Generated Poetry: Is there a purpose?

Generated poetry has to be one of the most controversial types of poetry around, especially to people that don't really understand or view digital pieces often. I know when I first started my college life, and started taking all these philosophical and creative classes, I thought that if I didn't have all the control over my own work, it wasn't mine. However, that soon changed when I realized that ownership over something doesn't really mean all that much. Ideas aren't really NEW, is what I'm trying to say. Most things today are recycled ideas that differ slightly from something someone has already done. Sure there may be some cases where the scenario is completely new, but think about it... so much time has passed and so many people have lived and died that it is probably near impossible to do something that will completely drop everyone's jaws.

This is where I believe generated poetry is strongest. Generated poetry uses words that we are accustomed to, sometimes with algorithms we are accustomed to and generates lines or stanzas for our amusement. Personally,  I use this type of poetry for inspiration. I try to make sense of the nonsensical. Every action provides an emotion, whether it be confused, agitated or apathetic, there is an emotion. I generally use what comes to me and create my own poetry.

It's a really good process to use when you're either in some form of writers block or just aren't feeling all too creative on a cloudy day. Generated poetry is what the user makes it; some use it completely for artistic and abstract books, while others (like me) use it for inspiration. We have to view it as a tool in life, as many things are, and use it accordingly.

For my first generated poem I used eGnoetry. It was a fun little generator that had it's own word base and a few tabs that allowed for alteration of the generated text. There were 4 variables that affected the poem. The refreshing of the page for a random first poem, the clicking of "regenerate poem," clicking to change the form of the form of the poem and clicking to change the model the generator already had. I chose to use 4 numbers then, to tell me how many times to click each one.

Since this is project 3, I chose to refresh the page 3 times.
My favorite number is 12, so I added the digits, 1 + 2 and got 3. This gave me 3 clicks for regenerating.
This is Com 390, so I added 2+9 and got 12 for the form clicks.
Then my birthday, 10/10/1990 which added to 21 clicks on model.

I felt that by adding my won algorithm that related to me, it made the produced poem more related to me than otherwise.

Personal Click Algorithm: 3-3-12-21


I received this poem which ended up being pretty decent.--------------------->

After that, I decided to experiment with single words in the poem. Clicking them to replace them with another word in the word base it had and have it altar the meaning of the poem. My final creation is also displayed. ---------------------->









The very nature that the poems are generated from a robot allows the poem to be something we aren't used to. The grammar is sometimes too perfect that it doesn't make sense. What I mean is the sentence structures may make perfect sense, nouns with pronouns and adjectives etc, but the sentence may make no sense at all because the generator doesn't know how the nouns react to each other on a real life scale. But I don't find this bad. Why does poetry have to be realistic... I find this type of poetry to be a type of fictional story telling, just how dragons are real in certain books, this type of grammar is real in this type of poetry.