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Charles Hartman, 2010, photo by CF

Charles O. Hartman in conversation with Chris Funkhouser

Mystic, CT 4 September 2010 unpublished transcript

Connecticut College professor Charles O. Hartman is a poet and musician who has also authored an important critical study, Virtual Muse: Experiments in Computer Poetry (Wesleyan, 1996), which focuses on connections between poetry and computing. PyProse, his sentence-generation software (for Mac OS X and Windows, 2006), is amongst the finest syntactical programs yet created; he has also produced Open Source metric scansion software named the Scandroid (both are available at http://oak.conncoll.edu/cohar/Programs.htm). At the time of this conversation, Chris Funkhouser was using PyProse as part of a social media writing project (virtually buried at https://twitter.com/ctfunkhouser), which is partly encapsulated in Back Up State, a poem that will appear in the forthcoming volume, IN|FILTRATION: An Anthology of Innovative Poetry from the Hudson River Valley (Station Hill). [Note: an e-book edition of Back Up State is posted on academia.edu as an appendix to this conversation].

CF: I’m not sure what you’ll think about this, but it’s really great to meet you finally, as

I’ve been feeling like we’ve been doing a daily collaboration for a year and a half.

COH: This the way things go these days. When you proposed meeting, I had to stop

and think for awhile to make sure we hadn’t actually met—you don’t know these days.

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CF: I’ve read Virtual Muse multiple times over the years, follow what you do, use your

programs, am basically a student of your work, but the way I got going on this jag using

PyProse on a daily basis since last March really brings us together...

COH: There’s probably people you can see about that!

CF: Some of my friends probably think I should do so. Anyhow, I don’t have a lot of

questions to ask you about it, but I do have a couple…

COH: You can try… I may not remember…

CF: Not so much the technical stuff. I’m interested in knowing what other people have

done with the program, besides your own experiments?

COH: Mostly I don’t know. Probably on average about two or three times a year since

the book came out I get these emails out of nowhere, mostly something like: “I’ve been

using PyProse, it’s wonderful, and I’ve been making great things” and then never hear

anything else about it. Most recently I got one that wasn’t about PyProse but about the

Scandroid. Some guy was teaching himself to write sonnets by using the Scandroid.

CF: That’s cool.

COH: I guess it is. It’s bizarre, and never would have occurred to me to actually use it

that way. Anyway, it’s not as if I were sitting in the midst of a web of people who were

producing with PyProse and making it into things.

CF: As it turns out, I’m really making PyPoetry, in the end, I think.

COH: Yeah. Well, sure—PyProse as opposed to PyVerse. I did try a version of it that

would filter its output through a scansion program so that its result would be blank

verse.

CF: I do that myself, manually.

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COH: Yeah, and that works, but doing it mechanically really doesn’t, which is kind of

interesting. Everyone knows if you take prose and divide it up into chunks of ten

syllables you’re not going to end up with iambic pentameter, but this was something

much more than that, something that would actually scan and only permit into the output

continuations of the statements that would appear as iambic pentameter. So you have

something that’s syntactically competent, and the output is correct metrical iambic

pentameter, and you wouldn’t think that that might add up to something passably

humanly poetic but my guess had been that if you had made the output of PyProse

scan as iambic pentameter it would then be more convincing than the pure Prose [an

earlier version of the program] output. That was not the case, not the case at all. It was

less passable. I am not quite sure what that means but it was a very definite effect. It

was lame in a mechanical way beyond. In PyProse, it’s maybe on average one in ten

sentences it produces that are haunting and persuasive.

CF: The way I’m using the program now, because of the Twitter constraint, I only go

with a sentence that hits more than 140 characters so I have to edit it. But after clicking

50 (or more) times I’ll eventually get something like a 200 character sentence that I am

forced to trim—this is a way of imposing my own senses. It has been a great way to

work with it.

COH: Sounds good.

CF: I’ve also been writing songs with it, which means I have to sit down and do the

metrics, so that I get the rhythm and then fashion the text accordingly.

COH: Presumably you have to change more about the original production.

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CF: Yes, I only take bits and pieces and merge them together. That’s a much more

loose way of using the program. Like you, I’m a musician—sometimes I take a song I’ve

written and pull the output from PyProse and slot it in.

COH: So it’s a human song, sort of studded with PyProse bits?

CF: With your vocabulary! This is something I’m so fascinated with, and always have

been—moving outside of myself as a poet, something I’ve learned from many

predecessors, including [Jack] Spicer, and [Jackson] Mac Low. So the idea of taking

this raw language, that I wouldn’t have come up with on my own and then shaping

something I can put my name on even though it’s not entirely mine has been an

interesting experiment. Got me into a little trouble even, since people around me want to

read it as mine, and try to hook it up to events in my life. And sometimes it actually

happens, as you say in the chapter on Prose [in Virtual Muse], we inevitably we do try to

make personal connections with the output.

COH: You can’t help it.

CF: Exactly—and here’s a good example: yesterday the word “udder” came up in what I

posted on Twitter in the morning, and then in the afternoon I get to this barn we’re

staying in and it’s called “Udder Heaven”—how does that happen? That sort of leads

me to the other thing I want to ask you about. Forever I have thought the database for

PyProse was a generic, wide-open dictionary, but I was just re-reading Virtual Muse and

noticed it is a dictionary you created.

COH: Yeah, it’s like 5,000 words.

CF: So it’s still at 5,000?

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COH: I haven’t done much with it since I first put it together many, many years ago; if

you’ve got PyProse and got it working you’ve got the dictionary—it’s there as a text file

somewhere. I think in the book I talk some about how I built that dictionary. My

recollection is that I started out with a dictionary of about 1000 or 1200 words and that

that was not satisfactory so I piled some stuff in and by the time I got to something like 4

or 5 thousand words I couldn’t see any real gain in making it any bigger.

CF: That’s a lot of words!

COH: It’s a lot of words. I’ve forgotten what the figures are for sure, but I think

Shakespeare’s entire vocabulary is well under 25,000 words. How much do you need?

And that was in Elizabethan times, when it was so much about plenitude of diction. I

mean, what’s Bob Creeley’s total vocabulary in poems, 2000 words?

CF: I don’t know—that’d be a good question to answer…

COH: It’s a question that never occurred to me before, and it’s the kind of question that

Russian linguists ask all the time, and people studying English don’t. An interesting

question, but a lot of work to answer!

CF: You’d have to be a dedicated scholar with singular interests. Anyway, the first thing

I said to my wife [Amy Hufnagel], who’s an artist and great supporter, when I discovered

that you’d made the dictionary, is that “Charles Hartman’s vocabulary did this to me”.

COH: [laughter] Right, right.

CF: She always wants to read it as a personal statement, because I’m putting my name

on it, and likes to ask things, “why did you say this instead of this” or “what made you

pick this sentence over this” and I’m not always sure—usually has to do with the way it

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sounds. When I first started using it, I was more inclined to take 2 or 3 short sentences

and string them together.

COH: Rather than use a longer one?

CF: Then I got involved with the long sentences because it made it more of a challenge,

in a way, and more of my lens is on it because I have to chop out a third of it.

COH: Right, unless you’re going to oooh and ahhh over the real gems that come up

you’re going to produce whatever you produce that is at all interesting to you by editing,

so the more you have to cut out, the more space there is for you.

CF: In a way it’s more of a sculpt, and/or my sculpt on the words. I want to do a book of

and on it, that starts off with this 800 line poem—a line a day for a year and a half—or

whatever it is, and I figure I should ask, when you made the program, if there wasn’t

some sort of thematic agenda integrated into the design. Obviously, since you picked

the vocabulary, there has to be a general domain, but you wouldn’t say that when it

cranks out 100 sentences it’s going to reflect a certain human value or anything, would

you?

COH: No. The dictionary that’s there includes the old Basic English dictionary, which is

about 600 words I think. The claim was that this was the minimum you could get by on,

and you could kind of say anything you needed to say to anybody for purposes of trade

and politics. Basic English was defined for Africa—that was the idea. I don’t remember

the dates on it, but it was designed so that we could help Africa out of colonial

subjugation by giving them the power of language, and why not English? All you need is

Basic English, but 600 words is an awfully small vocabulary to have any expressiveness

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to it at all. For the dictionary PyProse uses, when I use it, which is presumably the one

that you have, I did add some stuff that was very specifically mine.

CF: Like Bebop?

COH: Bebop is in there. Clarinet is in there for some reason.

CF: Virago?

COH: Virago may be mine, but as I mentioned in the book, when I was making Prose

twenty years ago I was doing a lot of freelance technical writing and was working with

speech-recognition.

CF: You worked for Kurzweil, right?

COH: It was probably the Kurzweil gig—they had linguists who put together English

phonetically complete lists of words for testing these systems, with quite peculiar words

in them because they had all the sounds made possible by words—they’d put together

30 words and have all the sounds of all the vowels, and some of those words were very

cool and would never be in any core vocabulary. They were, for me, a kind of random

element to add—this is not thematic, this is phonetic. This happens to be a list of words

I have been given from outside that contains all of the sounds that can sound, but there

was certainly never on my part any idea of building the vocabulary toward any thematic.

In fact, kind of the opposite because I was aware—I’m not sure why, it may have had to

do with reading about Racter—of efforts to mechanize the semantic combinations, of

tagging words by semantic field, such as, “this word is a noun, it has to do with an

animal that is quadrupedal,” and so on and so forth. That looked interesting but also

kind of daunting. When I decided not to do that, I was deciding just not to deal with

meaning. I just wanted to deal with structure. I just wanted syntax.

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CF: That’s the beautiful things about it, in my view. I use that program, and chose it over

the dozens I’ve studied, because it makes a syntactically correct sentence, and it’s up to

me to screw it up.

COH: That’s right.

CF: The whole idea, at the outset, was to test your idea that the generator is a good first

draft writer, which I thought was really profound and wanted to know if it was true. And

now I agree—I think the experiment proves it is in fact a good first draft writer.

COH: Or can be. My experience is that sometime shortly after finishing that book I

stopped using it, or anything like it, because it was for me no longer a useful generator.

What’s useful for somebody at a particular time may not always be so. I’ve been kind of

vaguely working on a poem for several weeks whose prosodic rule appears to be that

the whole poem alternates between words of two letters and words of seven letters. It’s

just another dumb rule, one that doesn’t require a computer.

CF: That makes sense—to mix things up. If you do the same thing over and over again

it’s not going to be very interesting.

COH: All these things, whether it’s the computer stuff, or the pre-computer stuff, or the

little-too-simple-to-require-a-computer stuff, or whatever, what they all have in common

is that they all void the sense that you write a poem by sitting down and commencing

with wisdom. It’s the opposite of the Hemingway rule that you sit down and write the

truest sentence you can.

CF: Hard to believe, in the postmodern world, that we have any greater wisdom than

anybody else.

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COH: Right, and at the same time that postmodern world is inclined to tell us that the

language is smarter than we are. So if you could kind of make the language do it all by

itself, maybe it would be better than what we could do.

CF: Coming up, studying poetry, I had great teachers, but they would have it that you

write from your soul and experience, from the special insight you have. After awhile I

realized that there would be only one Allen Ginsberg—or someone else who did that

type of writing well, and that so much of that at this point was mimicry. It was easy to

give it up, actually, and turn towards Oulipian or other process based writing.

COH: Sure, but there’s only going to be one Chris Funkhouser, too. That’s the other

piece of it. In some ways, Cage and Jackson were the interesting ones because they

seemed to be using stuff in a zen way, in order to evade the controls of the ego.

CF: It’s probably not a coincidence that I studied at Naropa, and am Buddhist—so it is

easy to partake in the tradition. Sometimes I will sit down and write a haiku or

something that I distill out of thin air, but that’s not necessarily what I want to do. It’s

more interesting to me—at this point anyway—to play with language that isn’t mine, to

add media elements, because most of what I do ends up being multimedia…

COH: The model of the poet becomes a little bit less the prophet and a little bit more the

ringmaster or producer. A little bit less the speaking actor, a little bit less Hamlet and a

little bit more Shakespeare.

CF: One of the things I got from Creeley, who I also studied with a little bit, was his idea

of surprise, and how important the idea of surprise is. How he did it was of course very

different than having an algorithm bring me something that I had no anticipation of. The

cyborgian things you can do using algorithms—with the personal and impersonal—are

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very powerful. Otherwise I’m sure I couldn’t be so absorbed in using generators or

randomizing elements within Flash, or whatever. I love it, frankly, and that’s not only

because I think of a lot of things as chance or arbitrary.

COH: Or that are in someway beyond your control, or beyond your personality. I think

that’s one of the reasons why the original article on Travesty in 1984, by [Hugh] Kenner

and [Joseph] O’Rourke, is so crucial, because their first take on what that program tells

you—and I’m pretty sure this was Hugh—is that below the level of a sample of 4 or 5

letters in a row, anywhere below that level the language is making most of the decisions

for you.

CF: True. Amy and I were recently using my Travesty generator and had so much fun.

She was blown away—I said, “let’s try picking a few lines from Edna St. Vincent Millay

to process”, and she couldn’t believe what it did to them.

COH: It’s a spooky effect.

CF: It’s fun, and you actually learn what’s in the original text—what the poem is made

of. I tell my students, this is going to teach us about language and how it is

constructed—and they sometimes get it and sometimes don’t. To me, it’s like magic—I

know it isn’t magic but it has that sense of awe that comes through in the process, so I

value that experiment. You must have known Kenner?

COH: Yes, I did. I actually physically met him maybe four or five times altogether, but

we sort of drafted each other into various things, semi by accident. In 1999 I was living

for about 8 months in Greece and broke that trip to come back to come back to

Cranbrook Academy outside Detroit for a conference they were holding where they

wanted to do machines and art. I told them if they wanted to do a conference on this

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you need to get Hugh Kenner, so we spent a few days together at that. It was that kind

of thing. The book that we did together happened because we had been corresponding

about programs we had worked on at various times, and he sent me this manuscript

and said, “Look, here’s this book we’ve written”.

CF: Are your papers located anywhere, are they in a library?

COH: They’re located in big boxes at home.

CF: Nobody has your archives?

COH: It is difficult for me to imagine anybody being interested in having them, but they

do exist.

CF: I knew Kenner from The Pound Era. When I was an undergrad, it was a big book on

all my professors’ shelves.

COH: I read that in graduate school and met him the first time then because a student

of his named Harry Martin was teaching there at the time and I took some course with

Harry that was dealing with some of the same territory—I think it was probably on

Flaubert and Joyce or something. A friend had lent me The Pound Era, and said it was,

“really good and you really ought to read this”. I’d had it for two weeks and was busy

with other stuff and was about to give it back because I’d looked at it and the first page

looked really hard. Who writes this stuff about a red waistcoat? I needed to get the book

back, so I looked at it a little more so I could say something intelligent when I gave the

book back, got through about 5 pages and refused to give it back—I held onto it until

another copy came in. I must have read that book four times. I still think it’s a

magnificent book, and I re-read it again for the first time in 10 or 15 years and was still

amazed. He was a wonderful writer.

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CF: When I first got wind of Travesty, I didn’t believe it was the same guy, thinking

Kenner’s a Pound scholar—I wasn’t sure what the connection was.

COH: He’d gotten Joe O’Rourke to help him with it when they were both at Johns

Hopkins and O’Rourke was in the Computer Science department. O’Rourke, last I

knew, was at Smith, though he is probably retired now. But Hugh had also written on

Bucky Fuller’s mathematics, because Fuller was a friend of the family in Hugh’s

childhood, something like that. Hugh was not somebody who believed in the division

between the two cultures [i.e., computing and literature]. You don’t believe in it, I don’t

believe in it, and Hugh didn’t believe in it.

CF: That’s great, we need more. I don’t know if need is the right word, but think it’s

healthy supplement to all these MFA programs out there in the world—they’re very

popular but are they progressive—is that something that is going to rock, or brings the

individual, the young person to say something no one’s ever thought of before?

COH: I think need is the right word, and I think they probably will, but only by accident.

You know Eudora Welty’s line about writing programs? Somebody asked her, late in her

life, “do you think creative writing programs stifle young writers?” and she said, “Not

nearly enough”.

CF: I lived in Santa Cruz for a few years, and I wasn’t studying there, just living

independently, learning from many sources, writing poetry, and I had a press. This is

where I was introduced to Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto”, and that planted a

seed—that we could do something more powerful with a machine. Rather than letting

the machine do all of it, or the human do all of it, we could put our unique properties

together. That’s what got me going on it, and a little bit later I learned about Oulipo and

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whatnot, and thought this gives me permission to explore. Ginsberg [who was my

teacher] might think it’s inauthentic, but I didn’t really care.

COH: Ginsberg thought each alternative was inauthentic until it really hit him and he

embraced it entirely. That’s what happened to Ginsberg with Dylan, and it was

remarkable. I didn’t know Ginsberg at all—I met him once or twice—but he always

struck me a having a mind that was enormously impassioned, so that everything he did

he did with passion. What he would do is resist and resist and resist and then embrace

entirely and find in whatever he embraced more than what anyone else was finding.

CF: I don’t know what you’d make out of it, but are you at all aware of Flarf poetry?

COH: Sounds vaguely familiar

CF: Flarf is a group that has become fairly notorious now in contemporary poetry for

using the results of Google search strings to make poems, and some are incredible

poems—very funny and telling of our culture. I’m in the group and it is a way for a non-

programmer poet, someone who’s not interested in the nuts and bolts, to make

something with the technology using Google.

COH: I was going to say, you talk about human-machine collaborations and what we all

meant by that 20 years ago was almost unimaginably difficult, and is still almost

unimaginably difficult. If you want to sit down and have a conversation with a computer,

that’s a real conversation—we’re still a long way from that. It turns out that where that’s

happening is the Net—it is a human-machine collaboration, a clearly a kind of

consciousness of which we are pieces, and which nobody can encompass.

Metaphysically difficult question whether the Net is self-conscious or not—what would it

mean to say that it isn’t?

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CF: Or is…

COH: You’d have to be prepared to define its self in order to know whether it is self-

conscious. Its obviously conscious of something.

CF: Conscious without a consciousness.

COH: It probably is perfectly solipsistic. The Net probably thinks that there isn’t anything

that isn’t the Net. Which is only almost true, right?

CF: That’s a little out there for me to get my head around...

COH: I think the whole thing is a little strange to get your head around. Bill Stephenson

and William Gibson turned out to be the ones who were right.

CF: True. I’m almost finished with my second critical book, which deals exclusively with

the Web, which is funny now that Wired is declaring that the Web is dead.

COH: Why is the Web dead?

CF: Because of mobile technologies, and how people are consuming their information is

not necessarily on their computer terminal.

COH: But does that make it not the Web? I’m not sure about that.

CF: I think of it as the Web, and generally look at the things Wired says with a brick of

salt because it is all about selling stuff and making things look cool, and the Web as a

phenomenon is still interesting. The idea of this book [New Directions in Digital Poetry],

unlike the last one [Prehistoric Digital Poetry], was to write about something that

everyone could see, which would save me from having to write elaborate descriptions.

So I set out to do this, subjectively selecting things I wanted to write about, case studies

about digital poems. I started in 2008, am writing the last chapter now, and lo and

behold two or three of the pieces I wrote about are already gone. This is profound,

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because I’m sure it will all be gone at some point, at least in its current form. I didn’t

mean to write a documentary study, but as it turns out that’s what some of it will be.

COH: Things move too fast for anything else to be true, that’s right.

CF: For me it’s a little weird. But I don’t care—it doesn’t matter, I’m going to keep the

stuff that I like in there.

COH: This is like the perennial problem of writing about contemporary poetry and

contemporary art: by the time you’ve finished saying it, it’s obsolete.

CF: But maybe less so given the immediacy of blogs and other online resources? What

you’re saying is true in some sense, but now it seems fairly possible to keep up-to-date

as critics. With tools like Twitter and Facebook—which are in a way a poet and critic’s

dream because they enable potentially large, instant audiences with which to share

observations and links. Every day I have 900 people who may look at anything I post.

COH: Mostly I don’t feel that way anymore. I’m getting old and hermetic, and

interestingly it has become much easier to be a hermit than it used to be. All I have to

do is refuse to be on Facebook, or to Tweet anyone, and I’m a hermit. I have to listen to

NPR to learn what “rickrolling” is, so obviously I’m out of touch and my students laugh at

me, and so on. On the other hand, the thing I’ve been working on recently, all through a

sabbatical was a series of translations of poems by Yannis Ritsos. Ritsos wrote well

over 100 books, and there’s this one little book from the middle of his career that

nobody ever pays any attention to, which I glommed onto half by accident. It’s 117

poems and I’m translating them all. Very near the end of the sabbatical, when I got

through the second round of translating the poems—as it occurred to me the next thing I

had to do was get permission to print these, to send them out to magazines, to get a

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publisher—I thought, wait a minute, the way to present poetic translation, which is

always so dodgy anyway, was on the Web. So I started designing a webpage that

would have one page for each poem, and on the page you would get the English

translation above, the Greek original below, and if you click on any line in the English

translation, you’d get a note saying everything that’s going on in the Greek that I can’t

put in to the translation. So it ends up being an offer to the reader: “here, make your

own translation. Here are all the options, here are all the words that I chose”.

CF: That’s great.

COH: So there’s a project that suddenly turned out to depend entirely on the idea that

you publish it straight out there to the Web, but it’s going to be a long time before I get

very far. I think I’ve got seven poems out of 117 done, and I’ve had to turn away from it.

I’ve got them all translated, but doing the annotations—it’s 1,263 lines!

CF: It’s a hypertext, right?

COH: It’s hypertext.

CF: This idea of being hermetic—I try to exploit this now, because I’ve got two kids and

family life has a stronghold on how I move, so it has been many years since I have been

able to casually go out to poetry readings, so that cuts things down quite a bit in the

poetry world…

COH: It certainly would.

CF: I do get 2 or 3 gigs a year, which is fine. We moved from New York City to out near

the Delaware Water Gap, and live in a log house.

COH: I’ve never been there, but it’s supposed to be beautiful.

CF: It is, but we are way out, in the sticks of New Jersey—and pretty strange, culturally.

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COH: Out past the Pine Barrens?

CF: Way northwest of the Pine Barrens, but same idea. One of the reasons we moved

there was because of the small population, less than 100 people per square mile, and

very good air quality, which is what we wanted. So I just hang out there, and I go into

Newark to work a couple of days a week and that’s it.

COH: How far is the drive?

CF: It’s about an hour. I’m teaching at Penn this term, too, so I’m getting out a bit more.

Anyway, to keep pursuing the hermetic, this summer we stayed at home mostly but yet

with the Internet I can broadcast, and my audience, or whatever it is, continues to grow

and I don’t have to go anywhere, and I’m even tuned out of the Internet most of the

time. The Twitter/PyProse project usually happens before 8 or 9 o’clock in the morning

and then I’m gone for the day, not on Twitter, I practically quit Facebook. I always

thought, since the very beginning of the Web, that this is a great thing because I can

just hang things out there—I like the idea or concept of “the Net” as a metaphor or

analogy because someone who uses the search engine to find material catches it, or

gets caught in it, and I don’t need to do anything.

COH: You don’t need a PR machine.

CF: No, and I don’t need any more than that. I don’t need to be global in the sense that

everyone knows my name wherever I’m walking down the street or something. This is

fine—in the way we can be hermetic we can still preserve integrity of a private, personal

life. The thing I saw with Ginsberg was that people were coming after him all the time.

People can send me an email…

COH: …and you can answer it or not, that’s the thing.

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CF: That’s true, and people can write about you or me or anyone and we can read it or

not, and respond to it or not, so it’s still at our discretion, our desired engagement,

whether we make use of the Web as a tool.

COH: It’s sort of like our relation to language. It’s liberating because you can do

anything with it as long as you understand how it works. All this talk of how we’re slaves

to our cellphones and email and so on is moaning for the weak, I’m sorry. If you don’t

want to answer it you turn it off, it’s just not that hard.

CF: Oddly enough I don’t even have a cellphone—this is where my students get on my

case for being a charlatan… “How can you live without a cellphone?”. Why do I need a

cellphone, so they can call me? [Note (2015): I now have a cellphone, and it is useful!].

COH: There may be advantages now in the fact that there are now so many channels

coming in, that it is beginning to dawn on everybody that nobody can do all of that. If

you spent all of your time talking with students on Facebook, which your students would

like very much, or on your online courseware, then you don’t have time to answer your

email. If you answer your email, you don’t have time for your cellphone. Nobody can do

all of that stuff, so I think there’s got to be a chance to say, “Look, I’ll respond to

students all the time through this channel”, and that’s pretty much what I’ve done.

CF: So I get the sense you’re not doing much programming these days? I know you’re a

musician and have released a couple of CDs.

COH: Yeah, I go back and forth between one thing and another.

CF: That’s not because you’re not interested in programming, right?

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COH: I can fall into programming so thoroughly that I really have to be careful. If I’m

going to do it, I’m going to do it’s what I’m going to do for three months. I kind of can’t

afford that now because I’m doing other stuff.

CF: …and you know Python, which isn’t going to change very much…

COH: Well, they are changing it, and I forget it, right? Every time I want to write a

program I have to go back and remember how to assign a value to a variable, and so

on. Python 2.7 has come out, and 3.0 is looming, or has come out. Have you run in to

NLTK—the Natural Language Tool Kit?

CF: I know a little bit about it, but haven’t used it.

COH: I’ve dipped into it. O’Reilly has a book called Natural Language Programming with

Python, or something like that, a big, fat review about how powerful a tool it is. I’ve

looked at it, and watched their lists enough to have a sense of what you can do with it.

So far it looks as though it’s probably a really useful research tool. I don’t yet see any

creative possibilities with it, but once it gets to that point, which I think it will fairly soon,

the kind of stuff I was doing 20 years ago will look extremely simple. There will be a

much more thoroughly sophisticated model of the language available right there on the

computer.

CF: When I was on my Fulbright in Malaysia, an Iranian professor got me interested in

the Neural Nets as a way to make poetry. If I had been there longer, we would have

made a so-called generator using it, and I thought it really had potential to create a new

type of generator. In the meantime I’ve noticed—and I don’t know how closely you’re

following the generator world—that what has started to happen is that instead of having

generators based on emulating forms, like the sonnet or haiku, now it has moved

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towards emulating the author. So you get Jim Carpenter trying to make the grammars of

Frank O’Hara, or on the Electronic Literature Collection, Vol. 1 you get the Millie Niss

piece which gives you vocabularies for Shakespeare, John Hollander, Harryette Mullen,

Dr. Seuss, etc. With the Neural Nets, that’s what it was about—training the program to

speak like the author. We were going to go for Rumi first, so I got involved with a whole

Rumi jag, and there were a lot of questions to answer. Since he was a historical poet,

what sort of contemporary vocabulary do you introduce? I think that will come at a

certain point. It may be like Turing, some false speech, or something—we’re not going

to bring Rumi or Ginsberg back to life, even if we can teach program to speak like the

poet.

COH: I don’t follow generators very much these days. It’s worth remembering when

Turing wrote the “Can a Machine Think” piece, he began by saying, “Can machines

think? Let’s not be cynical and ask, can people?”, and in the famous Turing test, the first

one he describes is not a machine versus person test but a gender test. Can you guess

the gender of the person at the other end? What was clearly, partly because of Turing’s

own incredibly fraught and inevitably lethal problems with gender, on his mind was that

people don’t know each other. This was part of his point, and if you think we have a

hard time knowing machines, stop and think how hard a time we have at knowing other

people. From his admittedly specialized angle, I think the question of whether you’ve

resurrected Rumi or have constructed a pretty convincing simulacrum of Rumi is a

meaningless question. If it’s convincing enough you can’t tell the difference, what the

hell.

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CF: I liked it for the idea of the reanimation of spirit. I have often wondered, for instance,

what Ginsberg would have said after 9/11, and if you could somehow—and this is a

ridiculous idea, but why not think about it a little bit—what could you do to make that as

strong as possible, whether it’s good or bad is not the question, but what does it take?

You solved that problem by letting go of certain things, like making this work connect

thematically with this word. You’re thing (PyProse) is not quite, but is more like

surrealism with its disassociation.

COH: It’s like that, true.

CF: But the Natural Language project seems to be moving towards something else.

COH: Sure—if you want to create convincing sentences using a context free grammar

generator like PyProse, a very brain-dead algorithm will get you a certain distance. If

you start controlling for semantic fields and so on, you get a farther distance, and so on.

At what point the human intelligence that is so closely identified with language enters

into the machine to produce language is going to be a real interesting question.

CF: Isn’t that the thing that Kurzweil is began to move towards?

COH: Yes, he did, but Ray is a nut. He’s a believer of a kind, and we have to stand back

and watch see whether he’s going to turn out to be right—you don’t try to judge it ahead

of time.

CF: Do you know him?

COH: No, not really.

CF: I only know him from reading these articles that make him seem a bit crazy.

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COH: I think he’s become much more that way than he was when I was working with

him—but I was just working as a contract worker in one of his three companies. I think

I’ve met him probably twice.

CF: He is basically hermetic, right? He’s trying to do everything he can to prevent

impurities from entering into his life, living in a highly sanitized space.

COH: I’ve missed that stage, but that he’s going to that stage doesn’t entirely surprise

me.

CF: I’ve never seen his generator—I have it, but it won’t run on the Windows XP

platform, or any machine that I have. This is a problem we have, on Mac or PC—the

obsolescence...

COH: I don’t know.

CF: Well, I have another month of work to go on this critical book, then I’ll be turning

towards my Twitter book, which is more creative—I’ll run it by you, to see what you

think. Because for me, to use PyProse over this very extended period of time has

brought something very interesting. While working on it something drastic happened to

me—about a year ago I was almost killed in a mountain bike wreck, which created a

whole new set of struggles in my own being, which came out in my use of PyProse, too,

because I am the filter. So it’s weird how I’m filtering it and someone’s going to be able

to look at it and say, “Wow, this guy is having some personal struggle”, which—given

the way you designed the program—has no real reason to be true. You didn’t design it

so that, despite all of its peculiarities, it isn’t going to bring, automatically, some sort of

dialectic that is about human or individual struggle. Or could it?

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COH: Why not? I mean Coleridge’s tongue-in-cheek definition of poetry as, “the best

words in the best order”—part of the point of that is that every poem is just this selection

from the dictionary. So if you’re Lewis Carroll, you’re not making up the words, you’re

just taking these words that everybody else has used. They’re like dollar bills, these sort

of greasy things sitting around in everybody’s pockets but you select them, and in the

act of selection you become a speaking person. When you’re speaking, or writing a love

letter or something, you think you’re selecting your language word-by-word but you’re

not. You’re not selecting most of the words—most of them are selected automatically—

you’re selecting a few here and there. So you’re selecting not on the word level, but

rather on some higher syntactical level. If you’re working with PyProse output, you’re

selecting on a slightly higher level, but you’re still just selecting.

CF: I’ve only gone into the code of PyProse a few times. The first time I did it because,

though I understand why you did what you did with it, I thought it came up with too many

questions—the default setting I think is six out of every 10 sentences have a question,

or maybe it’s 4. So I changed it. No problem the first time I went in and did the open

source thing, but the second time I went in I trashed the version I’ve been using forever

by accident, without even knowing what I did wrong. So I had to get a new copy…

COH: Sure. There are three pieces—there’s the program itself, there’s the dictionary,

and the grammar, right? You were editing the grammar.

CF: Yes, and at other times I looking at the code to my knowledge I didn’t change

anything and yet managed to disable the program…

COH: It broke? That doesn’t surprise me. I’m not really a programmer, so the code is

not robust.

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CF: There’s the struggle, for me—the code in there, and how we do or do not impart our

own circumstances onto that. A student of mine wrote an app that automated the

process of putting a line of PyProse onto Twitter—very nice, but you don’t get the same

results as when you use it as a first draft writer like I’ve been doing. It’s curious to think

about, and maybe I’ll do this some point, having a whole group go and individualize their

copy of the program and see what comes out—it’d be an interesting sociological study

to see how a student’s output evolves after 3 or 4 weeks.

COH: Absolutely, and it would be interesting in fact to give several people the same

output to use as input, and see what they produce.

CF: There’s no reason why the output couldn’t turn out to be about struggle, but that’s

not the point. All kinds of themed poetry generators are out there, but PyProse is not a

struggle generator.

COH: That’s true. It’s a sentence generator. It knows, or it pretends to be smart enough

to know what everybody who speaks English knows about sentences. That’s all. It has

been clear to me for a long time that if you wanted to do something with PyProse and

make a real difference with what it produces, you don’t screw around with the dictionary,

and you don’t screw around with the program—it isn’t worth it, it’s fragile, just leave it

alone—you mess with the grammar. That’s where you really make big differences,

particularly putting in and taking out the more elaborate ones with set phrases in them—

“as blank as blank”, that kind of phrase.

CF: Because after many uses you begin to recognize redundant patterns?

COH: Yeah.

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CF: I wasn’t thinking about this beforehand, but one of the things I really love about your

grammars is the way they use parenthetical phrases, which is a great device and is one

of the things that really makes it poetry—all of a sudden it has split-levels because of

the parentheses—it’s more capacious.

COH: That’s really interesting to me, and partly because in recent years, in writing

prose, I’ve been struggling mightily against my own tendency to make four layers of

parentheses within parentheses. So I guess I programmed into the grammar my own

natural tendency to layer and bracket.

CF: I see how that operates poetically, because you make one statement and then you

open up another door, which you close and go on—but what does it refer to? I find that

it adds dimension…

COH: It’s a natural, easy way to force one dimensional language into a two- or three-

dimensional act of meaning.

CF: There’s no other generator that I know of that behaves like that.

COH: Well, you could screw around with the grammar a little bit—which is where that

is—and make it do that more.

CF: But I don’t need to do that—I think it’s great as is, because it’s so keen on making

language—every sentence—work. And when it doesn’t, the nice thing about when it

doesn’t work is that we don’t mind disposing of it. If you spend six hours writing a page

of poetry, you’re less inclined to throw it away. With the machine output, we pick and

choose. Every good poet I know is a good editor, right? So much of the work of the poet

is that refinement.

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COH: Oh yeah. I think poets are largely distinguished by how much rough draft they

produce explicitly, then to be edited. It’s funny, you go to the British Museum and look at

people’s manuscripts, and with some people you get these endless pages of rough

drafts but I remember seeing Phillip Larkin’s notebooks, he was a librarian and his

writing in these composition books was perfect—every now and then there’s a word

crossed out and another one is written in, but that’s it. Apparently by the time it had

gotten to the page it was already massively shaped.

CF: Something to be said for that, but it’s not how most people work.

COH: If I had ever worked that way I could never write because my memory isn’t good

enough, I can’t keep it all in my head well enough!

CF: So it goes through re-versions.

COH: Yep, endless…