My focus in this blog over the course of this semester has been poetry, a subject which has always fascinated me and was core to my long-time pursuit of a future in the language arts. This pursuit ended up leading me somewhere else as I realized traditional careers in English weren’t really to my liking. While working on other projects, I realized that many of the same things I was passionate about in my English classes shine through in other mediums. I started coding my senior year of high school and learned to appreciate a new language of ones and zeros. A comprehension of syntax and grammar can take one far in understanding the rules behind programming languages as well as traditional written ones.

Today, I’m pursuing Computer Science as a career, taking my love for language in a different direction than I originally intended, but not an unwelcome one. My journey into this field is a clear example of the broad applications of the language arts beyond the obvious disciplines. Moreover, I feel like I can apply my technical expertise to advance my still persistent interest in the traditional arts, most specifically poetry. In the past, I’ve written programs that generate text based on example text, and recently I’ve been itching to expand that idea into something which understands grammar and written structure on a level more intimate than mere probability. My final project for this class will use this idea to produce poetry from code and a whole lot of example poetry for the code to learn from.

One of the most important things to me on the path I venture down is my own ability to find connections between the things I love and to share them with other people. While writing this blog, I’ve emphasized the importance of shedding light on the lesser seen parts of this under appreciated branch of literature. For this goal, it’s good to notice how we can draw connections between so many parts of our world and culture. There are dozens of ways to introduce a person to something they’ve never been a part of before through other things that they care about. We live in a remarkably interdisciplinary world and sharing that among peers is a base part of the human experience.

Today I leave you, as usual, with a poem. However, this one isn’t written by a human. Or, at least, not directly…

you
   
 
  are
    
      inscribed
          in the
           lines on the
     ceiling
    
      you
   
 are
    
   inscribed in
         the depths
   of
         the
    storm

‘Untitled’, generated at BotPoet.com

The above is taken from BotPoet.com, a website that not only produces computer generated poetry, but also tests real people on their ability to detect whether a poem is written by a computer program or a human being. I encourage you to click through the site, read a few poems, and try your hand at guessing where they came from. You might be surprised at the beauty in the ways art and technology collide.