Soul sucker

Eric Elshtain and Jon Trowbridge eagerly await the day when they are condemned.

“We really want someone to denounce us,” says Elshtain, a poet and Ph.D. candidate at theUniversity of Chicago. “I think Jon is waiting for someone to come out and call us charlatans.”

The creators of Gnoetry (pronounced “Guh-NOH-eh-tree”) haven’t yet raised much ire, but certainly a few eyebrows. Gnoetry is a computer program that creates poetry out of preexisting texts, spinning words from sprawling classic novels or pop-song lyrics into the rigidity of, say, a haiku. The first version of the program, created in 2000, simply pulled words from dictionaries, but the results were clunky and made the computer “look like a simpleton,” Elshtain says. That changed under the new incarnation, Gnoetry 0.2.

“When we hit on this idea of using preexisting texts, we were pulling anything in: the complete lyrics of Bob Dylan, wire reports from Reuters or AP,” says Elshtain, 38. “And then we found this dogged group of people in Brazil who had posted transcribed hip-hop lyrics from about 20,000 songs.”

From that database, the computer generated the following haiku: “But fuck the whole cake.?/?Bitch, you crazy, you crazy!?/?Make a move and see.”

“We said, ‘Oh man! This is unbelievable,’?” Elshtain says. “And we thought, We need to do more with this, because of these beautifulutterances that the computerwas making.”

Explaining how Gnoetry works requires a vocabulary that, if you’re not a computer programmer or mathematician, leads more toward migraine than understanding. Elshtain admits that he is unable to completely comprehend how it works—he claims he’s the “pin-up girl” and Trowbridge “does the black magic.” But he explains it this way: “The program statisticallyanalyzes a text through word adjacencies. So, it notices that certain words tend to come before and after other words, but it knowsno grammar.”

In other words, if Gnoetry were to craft a poem out of a mystery novel, it may include the words dark and night because the two often appear beside each other, but it doesn’trecognize that the former is an ad-jective and the latter is a noun. Inthis way, it saves Gnoetry from the criticism that its poetry is simply a cut-up experiment—the way William S. Burroughs would write a novel by stealing phrases from other texts and stringing them together. Chances are, the phrases that end up in a Gnoetry poem will never have appeared in the pre-existing text.

Though fun simply as a computer game—anyone using the program can generate poem after poem and edit the work through a simple interface—the creators of Gnoetry are serious about its output as poetry. They’ve published 29 chapbooks in PDF form, free and downloadable from their website, www.beardofbees.com. Elshtain has written the majority of chapbooks, but he’s also published poets from as far away as Canada and Maine.

The program can write a poem by yanking language from as many texts as one wishes—during a visit to Elshtain’s apartment, we used the work of Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain and FyodorDostoyevsky to write a poem in Japanese renga form—but something interesting happens when a single author’s work is used.

“The renga I did with Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country kind of blew our minds,” Elshtain says. “I do feel like the [Gnoetry] renga are Edith Wharton poems—it’s as if you could have a conversation through time. Her voice comes through, and her subject matter—the social violence and strained sexual relations—shines through.”

As for those who would decry Gnoetry as blasphemous, violating the sacrosanct soul of the poet, Elshtain has little patience.

“The important thing for me is that it’s given lie to the idea of genius or the ‘artiste,’?” he says. “Anyone can sit down at the computer and generate poetic language. Anyone can be a poet.”

Beard of Bees will release Elshtain’s latest chapbook Thursday 23.