beard of bees

Beard of Bees 100th chapbook

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To Cure Nature with Science is the 100th chapbook published by Eric Elshtain’s online imprint Beard of Bees. Written using poetry generating software Gnoetry, this chapbook is a treatment of the previous 99 Beard of Bees chapbooks:

“In an effort to honor the dual function of Beard of Bees Press, as publisher of machine, human-machine, and human poetries, editor Elshtain uploaded the each of the first 99 chapbooks in his Gnoetry engine and asked the machine to render the works, through its magic of statistical analysis and system of penalty/reward, into 100 fifteen-line stanzas, each line consisting of anywhere between five and ten syllables. Then, Elshtain and Beard of Bees factotums Rachel Burman and Shannon Frech pored over the material, looking for clues, hints, and threads. Breaking the material into rough thirds, each took a pile of stanzas home and made light to medium edits, finding arguments for changes on the punctuation, word, syntactical and grammatical level— sometimes, even on the poetical and historical levels.”

Leanne Bridgewater – The Homophone Translator

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Out now as free PDF and as mp3 on Beard of Bees.

“I realised I could use the sounds of a Polish man speaking to write poetry in English. This was the seed of the idea of The Homophone Translator. As a basis for the translation project, I wrote a short story, Silver Linear Cloud, in English. Then, I asked several competent translators to translate one or more of the nine sections of the story into other languages. I provided recordings of the English sections and they returned recordings of their language translation.

Once I received the foreign language translations, I “homophonically” translate the recorded words back into English. To do this, I listened to the sounds repeatedly until English words or sounds emerged I was interested in the process of constructing new poems, being inspired by sounds, rather than following the stereotypical path of seeing translation as an accurate transportation of meaning.”

New Gnoetry by Eric Scovel

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Gnoetry is an on-going experiment in human/computer collaborative poetry composition.

Gnoetry synthesizes language randomly based on its analysis of existing texts. Any machine-readable text or texts, in any language, can serve as the basis of the Gnoetic process. Gnoetry generates sentences that mimic the local statistical properties of the source texts. This language is filtered subject to additional constraints (syllable counts, rhyming, etc.) to produce a poem.

For our early work with Gnoetry, we have used classic out-of-copyright texts like Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class (obtained from the wonderful Project Gutenberg), as well as other sources such as rap lyrics, the complete lyrics of Bob Dylan and Reuters newswire stories.

A key aspect of the Gnoetry software is the ability of a human operator to intervene in the language generation cycle, helping to “guide” the artistic process and to produce a result that is a true collaboration of equals.

Link