The Magical Tale of My Computational Poetry Thesis, First Stanza

In order to complete my BA Linguistics, I have to write a Thesis. But not on just anything. No no. I had to come up with a topic that met some level of marginal approval from my advisor, Professor Mandy Simons, a sweet but daunting woman of ~5’2” with a bespectacled glare and a curious, nearly-British accent that escapes all notions of placement like a magical knot that becomes tighter when you try to untie it.

Because OT field research on Cherokee wasn’t going to cut it, I had to soul-search for a topic whose premise would not ostensibly get me thrown out a window.

What I settled on was a combination of my favorite parts of linguistics: probabilistic models and phonology.

You see, what first got me intensely interested in linguistics was Markov Chains. It’s crazy that such a simple mechanism can produce something that has all of the great taste of lexical value, but with none of the calories! A few months after I first discovered them, Lorem Ipscream was born, and the world rejoiced at it’s creamy goodness. A furrier project of the same Markovian fervor was born a few months later. That, alas, was an insurmountably bad idea.

These days, I’ve been on quite the phonology binge. Ask any of my friends.
For instance, my girlfriend has refused to let me practice my voiced uvular trills, despite my well-argued point that it’s a fun noise to make.

Anyway, combine the two, and you get my thesis project, which I’ve come to call Keats.
Just as you might expect, I chose to honor the great poet purely to exude an image of sophistication.
Never read a lick of him in my life, to be honest.

Thesis Abstract, would I were stedfast as thou art

My goal for this project is to develop a programmatic module that, given a subject—be it love, Paris, or Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle—can produce a valid (and ideally tear-jerking or awe-inspiring) poem in the forms of Haiku, Limerick, and Fib.

These three chosen forms represent three distinct problem spaces, as well as three very different opportunities to investigate the essence of poetic form.

Haiku

Haikus are easy

But sometimes they don’t make sense

Refrigerator

Threadless T-Shirt

5/7/5. Anybody who’s anybody has written a Haiku before. What could be simpler?
Without any constraints on rhyme or syntax—just the right meter—Haiku are both the easiest to implement, but hardest to get right. What is it about a Haiku that makes it so great? Is it all in the content of simple, but powerful words in sequence, or is there a hidden prosody that escapes normal conscious detection?

Limerick

There once was a man named Bertold

Who drank beer when the weather grew cold

As he reached for his cup…

“NEEEEVER GONNA GIVE YOU UP!!!”

Oh, snap! You just got limerickrolled!

Limerick DB #383

Ah, the lyric form of the Everyman. Filled to the brim with innuendo and wit, it just wouldn’t be any fun to do a project without Limericks.

As luck would have it, Limericks have a pleasant balance of meter and rhyming constraints to make the problem of weaving sultry narratives interesting, while narrowing the problem into something bite-sized and manageable. Already, I have a sense that this may prove to be a harsh battleground between the forces of linguistic-based models and statistical, machine learning models.

Fib

One

Small,

Precise,

Poetic,

Spiraling mixture:

Math plus poetry yields the Fib.

Pincus, Gregory K.

And finally, the wildcard: Fibonacci-metered poems—known by the poets on the ins as, simply, “Fib”. Forged in the crucible of rebellion against the scourge of free-verse poetry in the 1990’s, this postmodern construct provides much-needed structure to the syntax-starved poetry slammers while maintaining an open-endedness and irony that resembles Germany’s inexplicable lust for all things cowboys and David Hasselhoff.

Like Haiku, meter—not rhyme—is enforced. However, the number of syllables per line is dictated by an expression of the number of rabbit pairs per generation over time. Aside from showing up everywhere in nature, the imagery of the two previous lines combining to form the next is quite, well, poetic.

As a theoretically open-ended form (although conventional Fib poets stop at line six), it also presents the challenge of producing the longest possible poem. Line 20, for example, would require 6765 syllables, which is the just about the length of a SAT writing sample. Clearly, things are going to get pretty freaky if I leave this running overnight.

So there you have it. The beginning to my semester-long quest to uncover the secret of this timeless form of expression. For posterity, and as a demonstrative means of not putting everything off until the last minute, I’ll be posting updates as the project develops.