Markov

A Game of Poems

Greetings.

Hello, what is this?

This is a website dedicated to making Markov poems.

What is a Markov poem?

A Markov poem, as i call it, is a poem created by playing the game below, one step of which involves generating text via a Markov process.

Interesting. How do i play?

Follow these steps.

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Pick one to three source texts and paste them into the boxes below.

A game is structured playing, usually undertaken for enjoyment and sometimes used as an educational tool. Games are distinct from work, which is usually carried out for remuneration, and from art, which is more often an expression of aesthetic or ideological elements. However, the distinction is not clear-cut, and many games are also considered to be work (such as professional players of spectator sports/games) or art (such as jigsaw puzzles or games involving an artistic layout such as Mahjong, solitaire, or some video games). Key components of games are goals, rules, challenge, and interaction. Games generally involve mental or physical stimulation, and often both. Many games help develop practical skills, serve as a form of exercise, or otherwise perform an educational, simulational, or psychological role. Attested as early as 2600 BC, games are a universal part of human experience and present in all cultures. The Royal Game of Ur, Senet, and Mancala are some of the oldest known games. [Quoted from Wikipedia]

Poetry is a form of literature that uses aesthetic and rhythmic qualities of language ---such as phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, and metre--- to evoke meanings in addition to, or in place of, the prosaic ostensible meaning. Poetry has a long history, dating back to the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh. Early poems evolved from folk songs such as the Chinese Shijing, or from a need to retell oral epics, as with the Sanskrit Vedas, Zoroastrian Gathas, and the Homeric epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey. Ancient attempts to define poetry, such as Aristotle's Poetics, focused on the uses of speech in rhetoric, drama, song and comedy. Later attempts concentrated on features such as repetition, verse form and rhyme, and emphasized the aesthetics which distinguish poetry from more objectively informative, prosaic forms of writing. From the mid-20th century, poetry has sometimes been more generally regarded as a fundamental creative act employing language. Poetry uses forms and conventions to suggest differential interpretation to words, or to evoke emotive responses. Devices such as assonance, alliteration, onomatopoeia and rhythm are sometimes used to achieve musical or incantatory effects. The use of ambiguity, symbolism, irony and other stylistic elements of poetic diction often leaves a poem open to multiple interpretations. Similarly figures of speech such as metaphor, simile and metonymy create a resonance between otherwise disparate images ---a layering of meanings, forming connections previously not perceived. Kindred forms of resonance may exist, between individual verses, in their patterns of rhyme or rhythm. Some poetry types are specific to particular cultures and genres and respond to characteristics of the language in which the poet writes. Readers accustomed to identifying poetry with Dante, Goethe, Mickiewicz and Rumi may think of it as written in lines based on rhyme and regular meter; there are, however, traditions, such as Biblical poetry, that use other means to create rhythm and euphony. Much modern poetry reflects a critique of poetic tradition, playing with and testing, among other things, the principle of euphony itself, sometimes altogether forgoing rhyme or set rhythm. In today's increasingly globalized world, poets often adapt forms, styles and techniques from diverse cultures and languages [Quoted from Wikipedia]

Mix the source texts to produce a new text with the selected number of words. 500 words 1000 words 2000 words
Write a poem satisfying Rule M: Every word of your poem must come from the mix, except that you may use stop words or change the endings of mix words. As an example of the latter exception, if the word 'running' is in the mix, then you may use 'run' or 'ran' in your poem.
Check whether your poem satisfies Rule M.

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How did it go?

I enjoyed that.

Glad to hear it.

Where did this game come from?

It was inspired by a computer programming exercise i did a few years ago, Think Python Exercise 13.8. Based on that exercise, i tried to make my computer write poetry. After several attempts and feeble results, i realized that it would be much more satisfying all around to make instead a game for humans to write poetry. Thus was born Markov, A Game of Poems. Incidentally, i later learned through reading this American Scientist article that Andrey Markov invented his eponymous process through analyzing poetry, of all things.