Can poetry be coded?

There is a hackathon today to see if Shakespeare or Dylan’s words can be fed into a computer to produce machine-driven poetry

Coding and poetry are miles apart surely. A bunch of coders will attempt to bridge the gap at a hackathon today called “Code/ word/play".

The premise of the event is that with machine learning and Artificial Intelligence becoming common nowadays for computers to generate content, can a computer also write poetry? And will such mechanical or algorithm driven poetry act as emotional stimuli for humans?

“With entertainment getting digitised, will something, say poetry that is automated, have the same impact on humans that maybe a Bob Dylan or Shakespeare will?” asks Arvind Ghimiray of Gathr that is organising the event.

“This attempt is the first of its kind in Bengaluru,” he claims. Many such attempts have been made at MIT where they have taken a body of work, even

The Bible , and used coding to refurbish it into new works of poetry, he further explains.

With coding and programming in India growing by leaps and bounds, this hackathon will see participants, mostly coders, engage in a range of exercises to design code that composes poetry, to see if a computer code can understand similes and metaphors, to analyse how a computer views syllables and meter, and what is the manner in which code-based beings learn from the natural human language. “Haiku poetry and Bob Dylan’s songs are just some of the works we will play with,” says Arvind. They have 14 registered participants and can take in up to 25.

Participants will work around a conversation on language and try to understand if coding and writing poetry have anything in common at all. “Can a coder borrow from literary or poetic sources when composing code? Is it possible to generate poetry using algorithms? How far can technology go in providing entertainment?,” asks Arvind, a law student. The event will also showcase works such as Edward Lear’s Nonsense Verse and E-Poetry, which is a database of code generated poetry, he adds.

Gathr is a DIY entertainment circuit start-up in response or protest against being passive consumers of entertainment, “where there is no room for growth and participation,” says Arvind. “We want to disrupt that.” It was born out of the view that social life today has become too monotonous- with pubbing, clubbing, dining- all being acts of consumption with no room for creation.

This event is being hosted at Church Street Social Offline on January 7, from 1 p.m. Fee is Rs. 500 including brunch. For information, contact Badrinarayanan on 9916247056 or Arvind on 8892973833.