Poetic Machines 03

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"nature stands
considered
forever
in iron
with cold knowledge
revealing
one dream
that love just hooked"
"Poem #18450"
Generation: 19
Species: AB
from Darwinian Poetry
by David Phillip Rea
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"Poem #18450" (at the time of this posting) is currently "alive," and so far it has lived for 896 days, 3 hours, 28 minutes, and 6 seconds—but its fate nevertheless rests upon the selective pressures of Darwinian evolution, since its "fitness" gets tested everyday within an ecology of competing mutations, some of which thrive or vanish, depending upon the beauty of their words. If this poem continues to appeal to us readers who, like deities, determine the parameters for such fitness, then the poem gets to lend some of its influence to a subsequent generation of poems, each one likewise subject to the same selective pressures.
"Poem #18450" has arisen from an originary reservoir of 1200 randomly combined sets of words. Two of these sets, all generated by computer, get paired off for comparison—and then readers vote online for a "winner," doing so by assessing the poetic merits, for example, of the permuted lexicon, of the aleatory imagery, or of the oracular meaning, after which excerpts from the winning options go on to become randomly permuted with each other, generating new candidates for comparison. We thus guide the evolutionary trajectories of these "poems" by making aesthetic decisions about their "viability."
Poems unfit to impress us cannot lend any part of their "genome" to future poetry, and thus their own unique series of phrases must eventually go extinct. "Poem #18450," for example, is the "offspring" of two interfused, ancestral lines, drawing for its parentage upon "Poem #12331" (currently alive) and "Poem #17863" (currently alive). Both of these influences have constituted a kind of "genetic reserve," which has lent part of its matrix to a hybrid entity—one that has gone on, so far, to survive in the face of changing fashions among its relentless readership. We can thus see a random series of words evolve towards intelligibility.
"Poem #18450" has also spawned four of its own descendants: "Poem #18766" (currently alive); "Poem #18767" (currently dead); "Poem #19905 (currently dead); and "Poem #19906" (currently alive). The poem is interesting, because it almost seems to refer to the conditions of its own production. I might suggest that, despite the impassive processes of evolution, in which "nature stands/ considered/ forever/ in iron/ with cold knowledge," the mechanical procedures of both admixture and selection have, nevertheless, revealed the "dream" of the poem itself—caught on the fly, if you like, because someone has deigned to love it.
David Phillip Rea, the author of the algorithm that performs these tasks, has even gone so far as to assign one of two "species" (A or B) to every poem in the initiating population. Two poems of the same species have a 100% chance of "mating" successfully, while two poems from variant species have only a 20% chance of interbreeding. When poems of the same species mate, there also exists a 20% chance that any offspring might have an extra A or an extra B added to its designation, and over time, the chance of any two poems mating successfully begins to decline as these "speciations" become more stringently complicated.
Rea has thus created a kind of "ecology" where species of poetry must arrive at an optimal balance between, on the one hand, special adaptations to an environment of specific, literary tastes and, on the other hand, general versatility in an environment of changing, literary trends. The algorithm provides a machine for exploring these conditions of "fitness"—and just as nature has produced surprising innovation under such evolutionary restrictions, so also might we discover, by accident, unusual, literary mutations amid the welter of unfit poems, all composed by computer and then compared for our aesthetic judgement.
Poets who might wish to play God with this kind of "living poetry" can do so by clicking here.