From How to Write Poems With a Computer by John Morris: “Perhaps the difficulty of writing poems with a computer may discourage all computer programmers from ever trying seriously to do it. If it does, then poems may remain, as they are now, one last refuge for human beings, for their personal communications (not to be confused with what the schools call “communication science”), for the strange, non-random phenomenon that we call love.”

Morris’ work developing algorithms that write haiku’s led to the conclusion that computer-generated poetry that considers syntax, semantics, and surprise will inevitably lack human genius. For now, and at least until artificial intelligence catches up to humanity, individuality is at the core of any answer to the question “what is a poem?”

Morris’ work confirms my belief that all computer-generated poetry will ultimately fail. But I believe that computer-assisted poetry is possible, especially if the algorithm is designed by the poet to produce a nontraditional form and if user input (choice; “human genius”) is required throughout the process. Both the poet and the computer would be making decisions and therefore the resulting poem would be a hybrid.

The process of “writing” a poem would actually become an objective, predictable process. As an example of what watching someone “write” a computer-assisted poem might look like, consider an artist that is paid to draw caricatures. They draw a different portrait for each person that pays them to do so, but they have simplified and made their process as predictable as possible in order to decrease the amount of time that it takes to complete the portrait. But a poet that uses a computer to assist in the generation of a poem has more of an advantage over other poets than a caricature artist has over other portrait artists. A computer-assisted poet can simplify the process of writing a poem without simplifying the poem itself. Caricature artists get paid to produces portraits in a short amount of time, but the portraits are of less detail than portraits produced by traditional portrait artists.

Instead of using commas to signify a pause, the spacing between one fragment of language and another naturally creates a pause when read. My assumption is that all punctuation and grammar is unnecessary for an algorithm that generates poetry because punctuation and grammar are unnecessary for all free-form poetry.