So above are some of my horrendous attempts at predictive poetry. I’ve decided my text vocabulary is a bit too functional (get milk from shop etc) to produce high brow-poetry and it’s quite easy to get stuck in a cycle of ‘the’ ‘of’ ‘it’ and other tiny articles that lead to a creative dead end. But there’s still something kinda exciting about the not-knowing, trying to fashion an interesting sentence from the 3 words hovering above your keyboard.
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about how an algorithm can mimic our language, a computer program can even write a book. Botnik (which recently went viral for its attempt at a Harry Potter chapter) and Dissociated press ingest the rhythms and patterns of our writing before randomising the words to hilarious effect. This complex software is really our predictive text and autocorrect, writ large.
I’d heard of predictive poetry a few years ago through my boyfriend, who’s a big fan of Steve Roggenbuck and the alt-lit community online. But I have to admit, I was put off by the confessional, stacatto texts I read (Megan Boyle and Tao Lin in particular). They felt like a stream of consciousness, too forthright. Kenneth Goldsmith has referred to alt-lit as ‘wide-eyed sincerity’, often mispeled and lower case in the style of internet communications.
But I’m trying to look at new ways at getting in a creative head space and I thought I’d try it out. I ended up really enjoying the odd combinations of words. It produces a sort of free-association in the reader, and even though its nonsensical and syntactically incorrect the brain scrambles to find meaning. It automatically bestows meaning on these bizarre fragments. It can’t help itself, it wants to create a narrative.
The whole process got me thinking about the Dadaists cut-up techniques, slicing up newspapers for collages, making new poems out of old text. Tristan Tzara suggested pulling words at random out of a hat. They embraced a creative chaos, the potential for chance rather than a carefully constructed poem.
Is this the twenty-first century Dada? Instead of reaching into a hat, we can chose absurd, funny, illicit word-combinations from the grey belt of our imessage.
There’s a whole word press account (now inactive) with an archive of people’s text poem submissions here.
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