poetry is still the biggest snob-racket in the Arts with little poet groups battling for power - Charles Bukowski

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This project originated as a graduate research project the intent of which was to learn whether machine-generated poems could compete in the marketplace with the poems of blooded authors. (They can.) But it has evolved into an aesthetic proposition: That the MACHINE is a legitimate methodology for artistic expression. In so doing it has also become a barometer for measuring the sincerity (even the humanity) of the community of academic writers and critics whose gatekeeper status it openly seeks to subvert: We're pretty sure they aren't wearing any clothes, but you never know, they might just have a corner on the invisible threads market. That is not to say that the project is an elaborate articulation of the often voiced objection to contemporary art that "My 5-year-old could do that!" And the obvious response: "But she didn't." That is not it at all. Rather, the project seeks to disrupt the Academy's mission of exclusion, its selfishness and greed, its supercilious arrogance. It does so by composing texts that democratize both the processes of reading and writing. It's obvious that many of Erica's poems are as good as most of what emerges as academic verse. But more important, absent an author, any reader's reading is a valid reading. In short, We don't need no fucking academician to tell us how we don't get it, how we could never get it. We get it--we always got it. The project has had a winding and eclectic technical history. It has seen 4 major iterations, in different programming languages and with different databases and training texts. (Python, C++, C#, Java, SQLServer, MySQL, the Brown corpus, the British National Corpus, various literary texts.) The current architecture consists of an externally defined tree adjoining grammar, a rendering engine, and a semantic model. The engine makes its semantic choices within the constraints of the grammar, drawing its final selections from the lexical model, which imposes additional constraints. Architecturally, the engine works as an accelerator and governor. It simultaneously seeks unlimited freedom of morphology and inflection and inhibits itself from the full expression such freedom seductively allows. Otherwise freedom becomes license, chaos ensues, and the machine spouts gibberish. (Which is not to say that gibberish can't be successful--just look around--but the project's goals lie elsewhere.) The final poems are always a compromise between imagination unchained and imagination rationed. Design is most accurately manifest in code, so for a full description of the current architecture and the philosophy that guided it, please refer to the source, available here: Source.jsp.