Prose

In 1996 Wesleyan University Press published my Virtual Muse: Experiments in Computer Poetry. The book examined a number of approaches to using computer programs as adjuncts to the process of composing poems. The book is now more or less out of print; I am glad to deal with inquiries as they arise, which is surprisingly often.

The most elaborate program described in Virtual Muse is Prose. It generates sentences. They are random in two ways: the syntactical structure of each sentence is constructed from phrase elements recursively chosen at random from an editable grammar; and the word-slots in the resulting sentence template are filled at random from an editable dictionary arranged by word-types. It was originally written under DOS; that version is accessible by archaeologists. The same is true of the old Mac OS9 version, which used Jim Trudeau's Programming Starter Kit for Mac.

A nice new version is now available for both Mac OS 10.4 and Windows XP. (It's written in Python, using the wxPython GUI framework, like the Scandroid. Source code is available on request.) Download your preferred package here, double-click to unpack the archive, and try it out. If you find bugs, please let me know.

(Source: Author's website)