I conceived of The Angelic Beat Haiku Machine after reading an essay of Brian Eno's in which he speculates on the future role of artists working in the new electronic media. Eno rejects the term interactive, finding it too static and limiting, preferring instead unfinished. In this scheme, the artist produces unfinished artistic materials that participants--who used to be passive listeners and readers and viewers--play around with to create finished artworks. I was interested in how this approach blurs the traditional boundaries between artist and audience, and wondered how it might be applied to poetry.

There are other haiku generators out there, but they usually just pump out some poetry at random and then stop. What makes this one different is the fact that you can regenerate each line as many times as you want and then you decide when it is finished, so your own personal artistic judgment comes into play.

My role was to provide raw materials that I felt might produce interesting results. So I built the templates, which were more complicated to design than you might think, and mindfully populated (and weighted) the universe of words that the computer draws from.

I chose the"Beat" theme because I thought the results might resemble Jack Kerouac's stream-of-consciousness poetry (in a funny way they almost do), and because I like Kerouac's formulation for the American Haiku: don't count syllables, just write a short, vivid, three-line poem (also, building a generator that made strict 17-syllable haiku would have been considerably more difficult.) I tried to skew the database to give the haiku a "Beat" flavor by stressing the words that the Beat Poets favored -- night, road, angel, eternity, tea, etc.

--Jay Zasa