Software for Poets (Was: Re: Text-to-speech)

[Paul Rubin]

Francis Girard <francis.girard at free.fr> writes:
> 4- Propose a synonym that will fit in a verse, i.e. with the right amount of 
> syllabs
> 
> 5- Suggest a missing word or expression in a verse by applying the Shannon 
> text generation principle
> ...
> First, do you think it may be a useful tool ?
> What other features you think can make it usefull for a poet ?

I'm skeptical of this notion.  You can think of writing a poem as
building up a tree structure where there's a root idea you're trying
to express, "branches" in the choices of images/comparisons/etc. that
you use to express the idea, and "leaves" that are the actual words in
the poem.  Rhyme means that a left-to-right traversal of the leaves
(i.e. reading the words) results in a pattern with a certain
structure.  You're proposing a tool that helps explore the search
space in the nodes near the bottom level of the tree, to find words
with the right characteristics.

I think the constraint of rhyme and meter is best served by widening
the search space at the upper levels of the tree and not the lower
levels.  That is, if you've got an image and you don't find rhyming
words for it with easy natural diction, a computerized search for more
and more obscure words to express that image in rhyme is the last
thing you want.  Rather, you want to discard the image and choose a
different one to express the idea.  That means seeking more images by
mentally revisiting and staying inside the emotion at the center of
poem, a much more difficult thing to do than solving the mere math
problem of finding a string of rhyming words with similar semantics to
a non-rhyming sequence that you already have.  But when you find the
right image, the words and rhythm fall into place without additional
effort.

This is why writing good poems is hard, and is also why the results of
doing it well is powerful.  I don't think it can be programmed into a
computer using any current notions.