But I think I have come to the end of the synset road. Next step is to investigate Theano: Unsupervised learning, deep neural nets. Perhaps transition to Python 3.0 unicode. It might take 6 months to find the concentrated time. Until then, I am on hiatus. Got a book to write. By hand.

 My opinion: In spite of all the machine learning hype, computers are a long way away from independently generating credible connected contextual intuitive experiential poems or stories capable of emotional or conceptual cathartic impact. The process will in the near-future (10 years) require extremely creative and intuitive data science-artists to find the statistical-sculptures within the mountain-ranges of data fountaining from networks. It will be rich and exciting work to chart and out and develop classifiers trained on huge datasets which then generate simulacra of the writing they have ingested.

In the longterm, all serious writers will use computational assistants to suggest and enhance and refine linguistic creativity. And eventually, writing itself will vanish, artists will simply edit dreams and notions, and networks will drink and translate those dreams into user-specified formats. At that point poetry will become a mode of listening, as it is now, receptive, open, crouched down amongst the wind.

Shoutout: for an informed perspective on poetry-generation, see Gnoetry.

As a parting salvo, I did a very rough generation using templates based on lyrics by : 50 Cent, A Perfect Circle, Abba, Acdc, Alkaline Trio, Bob Dylan, Bob Marley, Counting Crows, Cranberries, David Bowie, Deep Purple, Dragonforce, Evanescence, Everlast, Frank Sinatra, Helloween, Guns ‘N Roses, Jimi Hendrix, Linkin Park, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, Patti Smith, Paul McCartney, Pink Floyd, Placebo, Radiohead, Ramones, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Rolling Stones, Scorpions, Suicidal Tendencies, System of a Down, The Beatles, The Blues Brothers, The Clash, Tom Waits, and U2.

4,704 new computer-generated song lyrics just waiting for machine-generated melodies, a robot to sing them and another robot to weep or dance. Read them here.

The first stanza of 50 cent‘s I’m gonna be alright rewritten:

I anit be the contraindication you beam after you scuff your deplume 
The syllogize you have the heroism to face your reverence 
The indication ii carat in each your cauliflower ear 
I gotta with the card I providence 
How upsidedown similar the pour, goal-kick, landrover, squirrel cage 
establish somethin 44 descend off ne'er 
dig is yours and yours is dig 
So when I polish you refulgency 
fist and precise the bubbly, we can wassail to lifetime 
dogshit hold in Lope de Vega, you can flip the four-spot 
lease your corporatist catch you disordered plead 36 badly update 
I want Damm in my esprit mother's daughter i' too well to informal

The final stanza of Bob Dylan‘s Blowing in the Wind rewritten:

How few school year can a volcano breathe 
Before we's gargle to the ocean? 
no, how few annum can some nationality dwell 
Before you're grant to be unoccupied? 
no, how few prison term can a crew move around his school principal, 
suspect he just project? 
The urim and thummim, my Quaker, is in the wind up, 
The tide over is in the wreathe. 

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

In the image below, 7,317 results returned for poetry ebooks, on the first page I can read none.

The 5th book on the list is by the wonderful author Susan Stewart. It is entitled: The Poet’s Freedom

“If this is a library, why can I only read some of the books?

Unfortunately, most books remain unavailable in electronic form.”

Consider the screenshot below: where the value assigned to IAK of 66º does not accurately reflect it’s value. Both angles IAK and GCJ, if measured with a tool like a compass, are 45º angles. Yet IAK is labelled 66º and the correct answer to the angle GCJ is 24º. It does not seem like an important mislabelling, yet there is a fundamental conceptual issue at stake here. And it has a relation to poetry (perhaps tenuous) but it’s an issue of trust. As Tom Waits said: “The large print giveth, the small print taketh away”. Exactly as here: where the faint inscription at the bottom states: “Note: Angles not necessarily drawn to scale.”

Bernard Stiegler (in Techne & Time vol1) writes “Numeration is a loss of originary meaning and sight, a loss of the eidetic intentionality that underlies scientificity as such: ‘In algebraic calculation, one lets the geometric signification recede into the background as a matter of course, indeeed one drops it altogether; one calculates, remembering only at the end that numbers signify magnitudes…’ The technicization science constitutes its eidetic blinding.” (Stiegler. pg.3)

And indeed a form of blindness is occurring, in this realm of math education, numbers don’t lie but reality does. It is analogous to flying on instruments in a plane; or trusting the supercomputer’s judgement; exterior phenomena are downgraded. Reality itself becomes something that confuses the viewer, common sense evokes mistrust. Data is God. And this process exemplifies a strategic stressing of numerical order over phenomena.

Normally, I am sympathetic to the capacity of science to avoid cognitive biases: but not when the visual representation of observed reality is palpably contorted. This process privileges a mode of reasoning at the neglect of observation. By bypassing reality, the posthuman hybrid augmented secularized infinite numerical field replaces the experiential refuge. Analysis of abstraction becomes the only mode of reasoning capable of arriving at truth because reality lies.

Slavov Zizek in A Pervert’s Guide to Ideology critiques overlays of abstract knowledge and propaganda that obscure reality: “I am already eating from this trashcan all the time. The name of this trashcan is ideology. The material force of ideology makes me not see what I am effectively eating”. Numerical ideology performs exactly this sleight of hand, replacing reality with a reality-that-cannot-be-trusted, and in doing so negates the body as a perceptual force.

Poets have trust issues with math. As mathematicians have trust issues with poets. Intuitions and concepts often clash with the conclusions of engineering.  Hallucinations and prophetic visions, once the bread and butter of poetry, are not credible. Numeration takes this one step farther and inserts doubt into normal perceptions.