Another day, another 10k.
I received an email today from a friend who is a poet named Ian Hatcher; his email included an MP3 of himself reading a poem I had generated using code that was a bit broken .
Ian Hatcher reads “woodland_pattern”I sent this particular poem to Ian because it included a lot of repetition; Ian’s style involves repetition, productive repetitions, calibrated repetitions, sung repetitions, drone repetitions, blind repetitions, profound repetitions.
To my mind the repetition was a bug; from the perspective of efficient communication, a repeated word is an inefficient redundant symbol. In my mind, an ancient mantra chanted: effective text is succinct and to the point. But Hatcher’s work (among others) reminds me of the parallel/opposite tradition of trance ritual (incantation incantation incantation …) appropriated by post-modern poetics. Time does not matter: matter cycles.
Poetry belongs to both traditions (efficient condensation and redundant trance-inducing repetition). It is both a sustainment of affective efficient communication where redundancy is reduced and it is also a mode of being that involves states of consciousness invoked by rhythm and repetition.
Repetition is exactly what my code started churning out unexpectedly today after I made an error in how I dealt with 2 letter prepositions followed by punctuation. So I generated 10k+ poems in that style.
A computer-generated stanza
predictably, aluminum business and USDA diverge diverge
diverge and the deflagration catapult
sow in the sagas van chicken farm carnival carnival
carnival with shallot desktop and radicchio
based on a template derived from D. A. Powell, republic (2008)
soon, industry and agriculture convergedand the combustion enginesowed the dirtclod truck farms greenwith onion tops and chicory
To read 10118 poems (laden with repetitive bug trance cruft) generated in 6966.78432703 seconds on 2014-07-30 at 22:42 click here
Code on Github
Made by Glia.ca
p.s. If you think trance is a thing of the past, consider the repetitive contemporary pop dance track just released by airhead (also sent to me as a link in an email today). Incantation is secular.