Electric Poet

Electric Poet 1.6 is a generative-text toy for the Macintosh by Swedish author Niklas Frykholm, submitted to Info-Mac in February 1996. It takes an ordinary text file as a mould and produces new pseudo-literary works in the same style, working best with abstract poetry where it is genuinely hard to tell the real lines from the bogus ones.

How It Works

You feed Electric Poet a sample text and it analyses the source to spin out fresh passages that mimic its rhythm and vocabulary, somewhere between Markov-chain text and cut-up poetry.

Sample Library

Version 1.6 ships with a sample library that generates Star Wars dialogue, giving new users an immediate feel for what the program produces without having to assemble their own corpus first.

Version 1.6 Notes

No new features were added in this release; according to the author it is a maintenance update that fixes "several quite serious bugs" present in earlier builds.

Companion CGI

Frykholm also offered Electric Poet as a CGI program with a live demonstration that ran at http://www.ts.umu.se/~r2d2/scripts/poet.cgi, putting the same generator on the early Web.

Distribution

Part of the Niklas Frykholm Shareware Package; the full bundle was registerable for $5. Archived at Info-Mac as game/word/electric-poet-16.hqx.