Ars Poetica

The painter works with a blank canvas. Ultimately, you can say the medium of painting is both paint and the canvas. Poets who generate their work biologically operate like painters. Other poets may operate like sculptors. They will treat text as material. There's no good reason a poet cannot do both. However, there is a strange revulsion toward the latter and a misplaced privileging of the former. Ultimately, those who fall in the former camp must suffer the revelation that they are more like the latter than they realized. Not one of the words they used came from their own mind. Instead, they are using a ball of stuff much like the sculptors do. 

No matter how much text generation a poet does, the editing is what perfects the poem. Every time you read a book, the language is absorbed by your brain. Synapses are forming around the text, the meaning, and filling a context. The sequence of the words is remembered. 

This text is a code. Your brain is a compiler. Each compiler creates its own program out of the script provided by the poet. It's a guided generation. That is what a poem is, to me. While any form of communication can be said to do this, poetry works with it new and specific ways to create new associations, new synapses, new associations, cross associations, and we do this, ostensibly, because our imaginations are conditioned to this because we prize this form of thinking over other forms. 

So, what is a poem?

I don't care about that question. Instead, I want to ask: "what information is in a poem?" You have the text plus some form of artistic restraint. I don't want to say that prose can't be a poem because prose pieces tend to be much longer than prose poems. Prose poems use prose in a specific way that is unique to them. They compress information very intentionally. So, I won't say that you can't have a prose poem. But I think that a prose poem has to have artistic constraint, and usually, that constraint can be found in the form of compression, if nothing else. 

What other information is in a poem? Well, you have the text. You have meter, you have grammar, you have an author, a title, a social context, artistic styles, and approach to composition. That's a ton of information, but it takes a journey to dredge it all out. The poem itself may only be the tip of an iceberg. It usually is. Ultimately, its ability to refer, like a word, to something beyond itself is an amazing revelation. Language is fractal like that. 

I consider every element of a poem to be meaningful. So, template generation has a sense to which it is interpretable, generative abstraction. So does ngrams. Ngrams are like raw memory data. If you use a text like the Bible, you're kind of digging around in the collective memory of Western Culture. There are other paths than the Bible, but Near Eastern has always fascinated me. Exorcism is a fun idea to keep in the back of your head when you're thinking about digging around in raw memory data. Possession is another one. The notion of being taken over by a foreign agency. That's a very powerful motif in Western culture. One of the primary functions of Mesopotamian priests was to get evil demons out of your head. We're still doing that. So, it's a big deal. And it's interesting and horrific to boot.