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about samuel  |
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samuel is a beat poetry generator I wrote in Perl for my "home page" in 1997: the source code is on GitHub. The only new feature is the permalink, which just reruns the poem with the same random seed. The paragraphs below are the original technical notes, dead links, extremely 90s earnestness and all. samuel is a short program written in the programming language Perl. I thought I should say that to avoid inadvertently deceiving anyone who's looking for actual information about real human poets and who threw 'beat poetry' into a search engine and ended up here. If you're one of these people, or you like real Beats as well, try this informative site. samuel works by generating basic sentences of the form ARTICLE NOUN VERB ARTICLE NOUN The nouns can get slightly fancy, like NOUN's ADJECTIVE NOUN or NOUN of ARTICLE NOUN The simple sentences then get glued together with conjunctions: SENTENCE CONJUNCTION SENTENCE CONJUNCTION SENTENCE... Every so often, samuel will free associate, and sound like Rik from the Young Ones: NOUN WORD WORD WORD WORD The actual words get picked randomly from lists. samuel is not as random as he could be: he has a tendency to use words he's already used. The great thing about generating beat poetry is that you can ignore punctuation and throw line breaks in practically at random. |
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