Links April 9th

The theme of the week is poetry.

365 days of pome

All that remains is for me to say thank you, thank you, thank you for reading and for so many kind words and thoughts and links. It was a garbage 2014 but we got through it together, and for that I’m forever grateful.

We need more poetry on the web. And more projects that end. And more humble honest reflections of times that were not so good. I take my hat off to you Matt and say bravo. I was a subscriber and loved receiving poetry every morning. I’m happy that you’ve moved on from your dark times too.

Reading Poems Made by Maths

The Shipping Forecast has become a poetic touchstone for the national subconscious. The forecast itself is a person reading a list of words and numbers generated by equations modelling the weather.

I wanted to see what it was like to professionally record something made by maths.

Just lose yourself in these poems. The combination of human emotion and computational poetry. Magical.

Equipment for Living - Poetry’s complex consolations

And for Phillips, poetry — and pop, I’d add — provides a “cure for our pervasive skepticism about whether language works.” Whether, that is, the right words can, as psychoanalysis teaches, make us better off.

This struck a chord - dense writing that’s hard to parse but makes you think deeply about language, media consumption and more.

The Poem That Passed The Turing Test

In 2011, the editors of one of the nation’s oldest student-run literary journals selected a short poem called “For the Bristlecone Snag” for publication in its ​Fall is​sue. The poem seems environmentally themed, strikes an aggressive tone, and contains a few of the clunky turns of phrase overwhelmingly common to collegiate poetry. It’s unremarkable, mostly, except for one other thing: It was written by a computer algorithm, and nobody could tell.

This is a really great read - full of interesting links to computer poetry bits and pieces across the web.