Programmed Poetry

O poet,

Blush like a rotted skin;

Brighten like a dusty tower;

Wail like a happy earthworm;

Dream like an enormous flood;

Tremble like a red locomotive;

Flop like a damp gate! . . .

The beaches are praying.

Listen! How they stifle their enormous

lips! . . . The river Winks And I am ravished.

Poetasters may now join the technologically unemployed: these freaky fragments belong to The Meditation of IBM 7094-7040 DCS, the masterwork of a computer. It is flawed poetry, full of silly similes and mixed metaphors. Still, Yale English Professor Marie Borroff has undeniably tutored a binary bard.

Herself a poet and critic (Sir Gawain and the Green Knight), Miss Borroff spent last spring feeding the machine simple grammar, assorted stanzaic patterns and a vocabulary of 950 words that she selected by letting her finger fall blindly on poems in classical and avant-garde anthologies. Then she had the computer's random number generator make the word selections and let it rip--at two stanzas a second.

Meat or Mind? Writing in the current Yale Alumni Magazine, Poet Borroff reports that the computer wrought "startling and at times strikingly effective imagery," somewhat like that of a happening or "chance" music. "Reading the collected output," she muses dryly, "one gets the impression that the computer is obsessed with earthworms and caterpillars and that it has a penchant for making gratuitous references to locomotives and Vaseline." Sometimes it rose to cryptic selfcriticism. "The roses are vomiting," it pecked. "Enough!"

Still, Miss Borroff recalls that M.I.T. Professor of Electrical Engineering Marvin Minsky recently argued, "The human brain is just a computer that happens to be made of meat." Is the computer, she asks, "just a poet's mind that happens to be made of electronic circuitry?" Her conclusion: "There are no foreseeable limits to the complexity of electronic intelligence. Eventually, the key question will be not whether the computer can simulate the independent activity of a poet, but whether we want it to."

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