Computerized haiku,
Margaret Masterman
'. . . playing with any new technique is the first stage of
handling it seriously and really exploiting it.' (Masterman)
A Japanese haiku is a three-line poem of 17 syllables with
the following line-pattern:
Line 1: 5 syllables
Line 2: 7 syllables
Line 3: 5 syllables
It is not limited with regard to subject-matter, but strictly speaking,
should contain some reference, however distant, to the season of the
year.
Through lack of sufficient knowledge of these facts, our
first effort to produce a machine-aided haiku was irregular;
since, though the number of syllables was right, the line- pattern of
the frame of the haiku, which was stored in the computer, was:
Line 1: 7 syllables
Line 2: 5 syllables
Line 3: 5 syllables
The computer's simulation of the action of the poet's mind:
the thesaurus and the frame.
In order to use a machine to handle natural language for any purpose
whatever, you have to make a hypothesis about the nature, the
potentialities and the structure of the sample of natural language,
which you are putting into your machine. As a radio critic recently
said, you have got to 'crack language'. This fact has either not been
realized, or has been evaded up to now, particularly by those working
on information retrieval and in mechanical translation, two fields in
which the capacity to 'crack language' is quite evidently required.
To put 1,000,000 words of Russian-English alphabetized
dictionary on disc, make the computer match it with the alphabetized
set of words in a Russian text (with the same word matched against the
same translation each time it comes), record the matched entries in the
serial text order and then print out the English: to do all this
without first
gaining any insight or understanding of what translation is, this is
not to translate at all but to use the computer simply to
transliterate. Any true translation there may be will be performed by
the unfortunate man who tries to make out what the computer output with
which he is presented can possibly have meant; and such a man will be
translating (if he can) from computer output into English. What the
computer itself produces could only be called 'idiot translation'.
The same goes for poetry. To put a set of words on disc in the machine,
program the machine to make a random choice between them, constrained
only by rhyming requirements, and to do nothing else, this is to write
idiot poetry. Judged by this test (the test being how much insight was
used in making them), the poems produced by computers are, on the
whole, at present very inferior to computer-produced graphics where
sophisticated mathematical formulae are mechanically converted to
produce abstract topological designs, some of these being of deep
metaphysical beauty.
In poetry, we have not as yet got the generating formulae;
though who would doubt that a poem, any poem, has in fact an interior
logic of its own? The analytic attack made upon the Japanese haiku,
therefore, in order to computerize it, represents a first attempt to
get the glimmer of a glimmer of what the interior logic of a simple
poem-form could be like.
This fact that the difficult problem of producing a poem's generating
formula was for the first time made explicit by a rudimentary
generating formula being actually displayed, sufficiently explains the
haiku's unexpected success at the Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition.
People who were neither Japanese nor poets could, and did, work the
algorithm and produce a poem; which then, in some cases. they carefully
treasured and placed in their breast pockets. (The same phenomenon was
observed at an earlier stage at the Cambridge Language Research Unit.
An engineer and an information-scientist, each with an international
reputation, both wrote poems from the algorithm at a research meeting
and both were observed slinking secretly back into the meeting-room
afterwards to copy their own poems off the display-board, put them in
their pockets and take them home. When a poet, Alan Trist, came to the
exhibition, of course, he adopted the idea, not the haiku: and invented
his own frame and wrote his own poems, from his own algorithm - which
was just what had been hoped that someone would do. But long before
this, the exhibit giving the poem-game had succeeded, beyond all hope,
in its primary object which was that of enabling non-poets to be able
to make poems - by play.)
Not only has it been shown by Huizinga, in his book Homo Ludens, that
play is a fundamental religious activity;
but also playing with any new technique is the first stage of handling
the said technique seriously, of really exploiting it. Here, we have
got genuine art creating new techniques? which will emerge as soon as
more business executives who have on-line consoles in their offices,
find it more fun to write poems on them than to explore the current
state of the market, or to model their own firm's production flow. The
computer can process more words, faster, than can any human being; it
can multi-classify to an extent far beyond the ultimate limit of
classification which man can contemplate: it can file-handle,
mechanically generating any new file out of any old one with no
constraint (e.g. it can turn all the men mentioned in a newspaper
report into women, or turn an apologetic business letter into an
abusive one, etc.). A moment's reflection should suffice to convince of
the immensity of this power. Likewise, it can produce degrees and
categories of randomness: and the philosophic re-examination of the
whole notion of randomness has been one of the intellectual advances
which have occurred partly as side-effects from the intensive study of
mechanized calculation. But of all these techniques, the one which is
most immediately relevant to compute poetry making, is that of
man-machine interaction by means of a reactive online
console connected to large rapid-access computer
memory. For this enables the computer to enhance and
extend the live poet's creativity; not to replace it as would
batch-programming a poem on a computer. Larger vocabularies and
unusual connexions between the words in them, together with intricate
devices hitherto unexplored forms of word-combination, all these can be
inserted into the
machine, and still leave the live poet, operating the console, free to
choose when, how and whether they should be employed: for the machine
is being used here as an extension of a typewriter, not as an extension
of a desk-calculator.
So, there are genuine new techniques here, for the poet to
use, and also genuine areas of knowledge to be explored. One such area
is that which lies between what car ordinarily be said, in normal
correct English, through what, by extension of saying, might be
poetically said, before the boundary is reached of complete gibberish.
Another is the exploration of different poetic logics, using 'logic'
here in an extended but still definite sense. And the "achievement to
be conquered par excellence is the use of all this new knowledge,
when we have it, and of all these new extended typewriter techniques
(when we have developed them more fully) to enhance and give more power
and variety to the intuitive creativity of the real live poet; not to
replace him. For new techniques, once they become understood, can make
possible the creation of startling new beauty. How, for instance, in
music, can you have a ground bass continue, if the only musical
instruments known to your culture are a conch, a drum and a flute?
After such talk of man-machine interaction-aided ideals, the
computerized toy model of the Japanese haiku will seem trivial indeed.
Just so, the Think-a-dot' toy computer seems trivial, when played
beside, or on top of, the genuine article. But just as the
'Think-a-dot' becomes more or less insight- provoking according to the
degree of insight possessed by the man who plays with it, so now. Just
as elementary mathematics can be envisaged from an advanced point of
view, so elementary computer poem-making can be envisaged from an
advanced point of view. And the algorithm given here for generating
Japanese haikus on-line endeavours to do just this.
The hypothesis employed here is that every poem has a frame, and that
the activity of frame-making can be analytically distinguished from the
activity of filling in the frame. In the haiku, therefore, the
haiku-frame is stored in the computer; while the thesaurus represents
the initial treasury of synonyms, or otherwise constrained
word-classes, with which the poet, by man-machine interaction, fills
up, one
by one, the gaps left in the frame. The computer, meanwhile, having
absorbed and inserted these fillings, prints out the final poem with
the gaps all filled in; sometimes startling the poet at the computer
console, who never did more than choose one word from a given class of
words at any one time.
This, of course, is a gross over-simplification of what the
true poet does, and in two respects. The true poet starts with inspired
fragments, emerging fully formed from his subconscious; only at a
relatively late stage, quite often, does he choose his frame. So there
are (at least) three stages: orientating hunch, emergence of inspired
fragments, choice of frame. Moreover, the true poet will never have a
fixed thesaurus. Word-class-generation goes on in him even when
sober; and the more so, not the less, the more frightened he is, the
more drunk, the more inspired. Nevertheless, there have been periods,
and there have been cultures, where presenting your own poem (like
making up your own bunch of flowers to place in the bedroom of a guest
in our culture now) was an ordinary social grace. If our culture
(machine-aided), so changed as to require this grace, bought Christmas
and birthday cards would become a thing of the past; you would make or
draw your own, using at need your console, and the convention would be
that the letter press of the card had to be your own specially invented
poem - or your own specially invented code.
In such circumstances the process of poetic creation would be
accelerated, simplified and made self-conscious - and would become
something very much more like the process exemplified below in the
haiku (which was, indeed, just such a socially required poem in
traditional Japan). The frame would be chosen, first, to fit the social
occasion; and next, from a more or less stereotyped sequence of word-
classes consisting each of monosyllables or rhymes or half-rhymes, the
poet would make concurrent choices to fill in the gaps in the frames.
And, proceeding thus, a great many mediocre poems (see below) would be
generated. But - as also in the case of the socially required poem-form
of past cultures - what could be done within the social constraints
of such a requirement would only emerge when a true poet, handling the
medium, emerged also. A true poet might make inspired choices, even
when handling the toy haiku.
...
This text is an excerpt from: Masterman, M. (1971) 'Computerized
haiku', in Cybernetics, art and ideas, (Ed.) Reichardt, J. London,
Studio Vista, 175-184.
(May contain OCR errors).
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