I do not often sit down at my desk with a journal to deliberately write poems. More often than not, lines of poetry occur to me spontaneously when I’m on-the-go. Here is my essential question: how can a mobile application that randomly prompts users to input one line of poetry per day make the long-timescale process of writing a collection of poems based-on several prompts more efficient?
The python code that automates the order of the Twenty Little Poetry Projects would be one prompt in the back-end of the mobile application. The front-end of the mobile application would have a form that collects user completions of little poetry projects. There will be other prompts along with Twenty Little Poetry Projects in the back-end of the application that celebrate inventiveness and juxtaposition. The front-end of the mobile application would randomly notify the user to complete a random project from any of the several prompts in the back-end. Users must complete the project in one line of poetry or more.
Everyone who downloads the mobile application and signs-up for CoPo (cooperative poem) becomes a member and agrees to complete a project randomly once per day. CoPo is free to sign-up, but private. Only members can invite other people to become members. All members will be co-authors of the randomly generated collection of poems at the end of a year.
Users can open the application at any time to complete a project, read poems that were generated from the input of all members, or participate in discussion with other members. The source code for the back-end of the application that decides the poetic form and project prompts would be viewable to all users. Users can make suggestions to improve the source code in the discussion board.
The author of Virtual Muse, Charles G. Hartman, used a computer to explore the “effects of randomness, arbitrariness, and contingency on poetic composition.” This project is also an experiment with computer poetry, but unlike Hartman’s experiments, this project is interested in exploring the long-timescale benefits of using a computer to assist an organized group in the creation of a collection of poetry line-by-line.
CoPo would facilitate the combination of poetic minds. The application would decide the chronology of the agreed-upon and predictable (in form, not content) creative process, and therefore the poets can focus on imagery. Two or more poets will be able to write the same poem simultaneously, and they will be able to complete a collection of poems without pencil, pad, and pandemonium.
If this mobile application were publicly available and widely used, then there are other possibilities for its use beyond writing a collection of inventive poems. Instead of being randomly notified to only complete a project (For example, “Write a question?” and “Say something specific but utterly preposterous”), users could have to complete the project ekphrastically, within the context of a song or an image. User project-completions would be associated with the art that it was ekphrastically written from, and by better understanding that association and creating an algorithm that takes an average of human response to art, we may better understand how to create an artificially intelligent algorithm that has “feelings” and “memory” by randomly generating responses to art and collecting data on itself continually.
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