Reverse Engineering Poetry

 

This spring, Israeli programmer, poet, and new media artist Eran Hadas will be teaching at Caltech as an artist-in-residence through the Israel Institute. Hadas, who is based in Tel Aviv, combines poetry and computer science, creating software that writes poetry and text with input from the Internet. His Wikipedia entry describes him as "an Israeli poet, software developer, new media artist, and the author of seven books"—a set of titles he embraces. "I always joke that I consider myself a poet, but in order to be taken seriously, other people should consider me as a software developer," Hadas laughs. "I once heard the saying, 'Poetry is the R&D department of humanity.' I wish to augment it to 'the R&D department of post-humanity,' but at the core of either is the decision to step out of our particular selves and raise questions about our being." Hadas will be introducing his Caltech students to computational literature, covering the evolution of poetry and poets from the end of the Romantic era until 2045, when futurist Ray Kurzweil predicted the singularity—the point at which artificial intelligence and technology surpasses human capabilities. Hadas has no concerns about the students' receptiveness to this new field. "Poetry means different things to different people," Hadas notes, "and I'm not going to impose my own views on the students but rather try to embrace their feelings and backgrounds, and bind them to a poetic path. Having said that, I find many similarities between poetry and coding. Poetry can be viewed as a series of rewritings that modify form but preserve content. This process bears resemblance to code refactoring, which is a process that coders often experience as an impulse, much like an urge a poet might have.