o
       _   ,_    __   ,   __,      __
     |/ \_/  |  /  \_/ \_/  |  |  /
     |__/    |_/\__/  \/ \_/|_/|_/\___/
    /|
    \|

prosaic is a poetry generator

this is the old prosaic. There's a new version with actual documentation at: https://github.com/nathanielksmith/prosaic

summary

• based on the weltanschauung algorithm
• directed cut-up poetry over large corpora
• two halves:
• nyarlathotep, reads, parses, tags text and stores in mongodb
• cthulhu, given a poem template in JSON generate a cut-up piece

usage

    wget http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/31469/pg31469.txt
    ./nyarlarthotep.coffee pg31469.txt
    ./cthulhu.coffee templates/haiku.json
    [ 'How horrid you are',
      'Works of man cultivation',
      'Watching his water' ]

but... why?

• william burroughs had some good ideas
• largely intended for human collaboration; the poems it puts out can be thought of as a starting point for further work. some corpora, however, cause beautiful works to be produced with little/no human intervention.
• we waste millions of minutes filling the internet with junk text that will be lost forever. the tools of cutup/juxtaposition uncover works of beauty that we'd otherwise never see

examples

i have published a few sonnets on gnoetry daily.

disclaimer

• hacky art project
• totally bizarre code style

author

nathaniel k smith [email protected]