Friday, May 05, 2006

The Rediscovery of a Lost Poem

Today I was thinking about some of the blogs I used to go to a few years ago, and I remembered an experimental piece of poetry/webwork that one of my old forum friends (and Unreal Tournament god) had done, and sure enough I found it.

One Fiction is a villanelle, which is of itself a difficult poetic form to write, but the author also managed through context to bring so much more to the piece... well, at least it does to me. I hope you enjoy it too.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Loved the poem and the site. Good stuff! :)

MC said...

Some of his other experiments are pretty cool too... like his piece called "Virus" which is a found poem based on computer virus names.

Anonymous said...

These thoughts occured to me after I posted the link on a forum.

The poem is probably read by a computer -- probably an Apple computer readback function. I'm most impressed by the idea that a computer read program can read a poem, flat and emotionless as computers might be, that didn't seem too bad...

It made me wonder what computer readback function would sound like reading other forms of poem; for example: can it read free form with the same effectiveness?

This might be a thought of a rather lazy person (eg myself), but if you can have a program that reads the poem you write back to you, it can be a useful tool. At this point, it might be wishful thinking, considering a computer will not be able to perfectly understand where to stress a word (like at the end of a line in some poems) nor will it know how to adjust its tone or speed to the way a line or strophe in a poem is meant to be read.

MC said...

I remember a Radiohead song from OK Computer which seemed to use the same technology for all the lyrics, so I agree with you that it is an effective devise.

But about the development of a program that would be capable of reading back a free verse poem or any form of prose/prosody in a normal conversational way... I think it would be possible to do that, but the user would probably have to train the system as to how to read it the right way, perhaps even going so far as to make it a dual-line process where the words are on one line and the stresses/pauses would be on another.

Actually, the principles of music would probably work the best in that case.