A novel of small odes

[kayserifserif]

I've been working on a generative poetry bot (https://botsin.space/@smallness) that uses Tracery to produce little odes to life, based on templates combined with nouns or verbs — "the mountain is a poem", "take, for example, the sparrow", "here in the breathing", etc. Would like to try stringing 50,000 words worth of these together. Might try to think of more to do beyond that but that'll be the first step!

[kayserifserif]

Okay, crap, I ran out of time to refine it, but here's a proof of concept. There's randomness in the conjunctions and punctuation between phrases, but I started trying to put together a bit of logic in how those are assembled and attached, and making little tweaks in certain phrases depending on where in a sentence they are.

Some excerpts:

look, the calling & it’s here in the arising; look, the overcoming & the practice of dancing & the abundance of worrying — still, the settler, but the art of the salute; so it goes, the withdrawing

(becoming is a form of love.) the art of the rust. the abundance of commenting (the abundance of
occurring.) destroying is a poem

look, the borrowing & listen, the meaning

the sorrow of the leaving, though the learning of it all...

how sweet the interior. the gasp is a poem

listen, the raining — how sweet the pulling

it’s here in the hurting, & listen, the overcoming and how the little quiet...

(how the little sculpting.) the boiling of it all. the weaving of it all. the forgetting of it all... so it goes, the springing, & the smallness of the feeling - the poetic display

Things to work on:

• Increase the occurrence of a paragraph/stanza break (I think 2–5 little ideas work best together as an offering of juxtaposition)
• Keep tweaking the bits of logic to help things flow together better, maybe use a sort of tokenizer structure to alter phrases in context of its neighbouring phrases and punctuation marks
• It could be interesting to try to pull phrases together based on their semantic similarity, but am on the fence about that because the juxtaposition can be so interesting or in some cases funny. If I do try this, I could lean into the structure and separate the text into chapters: odes to nature, odes to love, odes to the body (and maybe there's still an element of randomness that I can use to pull the occasional strange bedfellow into clusters of otherwise similar words)
• Typesetting, design, maybe interactivity (maybe it can have a little persistent state / multiplayer thing where people can highlight stanzas they like)

Full sample (>= 50k words, to meet the prompt):

sample-2311301711.pdf

[kayserifserif]

Oh, links to source:

Tracery grammar: https://github.com/kayserifserif/smallness/blob/main/bot-gen/tracery.json
Code to generate a text: https://github.com/kayserifserif/smallness/blob/main/bot-gen/main.js