poem.exe

poem.exe is a micropoetry bot, assembling haiku-like poems throughout the day and publishing them on Twitter and Tumblr. It uses an Oulipo technique based on Raymond Queneau’s A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems. Verses are selected at random from a collection of a few hundred, and a single line is taken from each one to produce a new poem. After assembling a poem in this way, the program looks for seasonal references and uses these to decide whether to publish or reject the poem. The bulk of the corpus it reads from consists of translated haiku by Kobayashi Issa; as a result, many of the poems are coloured by Issa’s personality, in particular his fondness for snails.