I am not sure if I would be interested in machine-generated poetry -- or poetry, for that matter -- if it wasn’t for Racter. In 1984, Racter, short for Raconteur, is reputed to be the first computer program program to write a book. Called The Policeman's Beard is Half Constructed, Racter’s literary debut and swan song -- a 'bizarre and fantastic journey into the mind of a machine' -- was published by United Artists Books and is never less than $100 on Alibris and Amazon. (That's the record nerd part of me bragging right there.)
I used to keep a copy of The Policeman’s Beard in an ad hoc chattel I had when I worked nights at the Rutgers-Camden Library. I would read passages like
At all events my own essays and dissertations about love
and its endless pain and perpetual pleasure will be
known and understood by all of you who read this and
talk or sing or chant about it to your worried friends
or nervous enemies. Love is the question and the subject
of this essay. We will commence with a question: does
steak love lettuce? This quesion is implacably
hard and inevitably difficult to answer. Here is
a question: does an electron love a proton,
or does it love a neutron? Here is a question: does
a man love a woman or, to be specific and to be
precise, does Bill love Diane? The interesting
and critical response to this question is: no! He
is obsessed and infatuated with her. He is loony
and crazy about her. That is not the love
of steak and lettuce, of electron and proton and
neutron. This dissertation will show that the
love of a man and a woman is not the love of
steak and lettuce. Love is interesting to me
and fascinating to you but it is painful
to Bill and Diane. That is love!
then read something my creative writing professor recommended to me – say, John Ashbery’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror or Wallace Stevens – and marvel at how much closer this computer program, “written in compiled BASIC on a Z80 with 64k of RAM,” as the introduction states, could be more inventive than my own work in reaching Stevens-Ashbery proportions. It was, to be honest, vastly depressing.
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Back then, even with all of the science fiction under my belt, back issues of Omni strewn across my room, progressive rock posters adorning my walls, it never occurred to me that there had to be a human somewhere along the line, either keying in the program, coming up with the idea in the first place, or suggesting words for the machine what words to spit out.
I like how, in retrospect, hardcore folks in Artificial Intelligence insist that Racter’s program parameters were “artificially tweaked” to generate more “literary literature.”
Of course it had to be “tweaked”—what’s even more interesting perhaps is that those initial critics of the Racter book—playa hatas all, if you ask me—can’t get over the fact that the success of the book, or its continued fame, is really more about how those words that were put in the program were better than their own—here’s the most famous criticism of Racter, from the Web site Robot Wisdom--
None of the long pieces in the book could have been produced except by using elaborate boilerplate templates that are not included in the commercially available release of Racter. Nor does [Racter] include any sort of 'syntax directive' powerful enough to string words together into a form like the published stories.
Racter, the writer says, is more writing “degeneration more than text generation.” And this truth is further disguised by using templates that are themselves 'wacky', leading one to attribute to Racter a style that's really Chamberlain's.
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Well, what style were we aiming at? There has to be the tip of the finger of God somewhere. It just is. It’s no different than genetic code, I think; the fact that I can’t shake my father’s bullying tenor from my voice no matter how hard I try is enough proof for me.
None of this is new, and my own attempts to generate writing -- my Random Prose Poem Generator, which was itself taken from source code from Don Cross -- means I have to submit to the program at a crucial, paratactical point. I like that. As a former Catholic who is thinking about becoming atheist, I am seeking higher powers as we speak.
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Right now, on another open window in my computer, I’m typing into a chat bot, which bascially answers your inputs with versions of what you wrote or the programming team. You could type in “Your mom wear combat boots,” as I do to that program on my computer right now, and Claude, my favorite chatbot replies, “Hey there, now I would never want to do anything to harm my mom. They are just so gosh darn purposeful!”
The interest or novelty or sensibility of appeal of artifical intelligence poetry has to do with all of the random texts coming at us everywhere—the Fox News ticker, Google search results, instant messages. In the company of all this, the notion of sole poetic authorship, computer program or human, seems almost ludicrous.
On the other hand, and I’ll be the first to admit this is a viewpoint coming from a European-American, authority seeking, reformed New Critic—there has to be an agent of order, the mark of a style.
And this is where one section from OuLiPo: A Primer of Potential Literature bears mentioning, one that sticks in my mind (Shanna Compton's workshop with Harry Mattnews, another OuLiPoan, is relevant here). Raymond Queneau, in his section explaining the N+7 method, which consists in taking an replacing each noun with the seventh following it in a dictionary, writes that the results from these experiments are “always interesting” and “sometimes astonishing.” And I agree. But Queneau says something else, and I used to think it was just a joke, but in my own practice of this N+7, I found it to be true.
“It seems,” Queneau wirite, “that only good texts give good results.”
