In between eating, watching Breaking Bad streaming on my computer, ding ding ding, doing some redesign and rebranding for crowdcollection now called thecrwd, I have been trying to improve my algorithmic poetry.  To this end, I picked up a book, 'Virtual Muse', which was written in 1995 but seems very contemporary. 

Although I am just in chapter two I am taking a moment to ponder the author's analysis of Jabberwocky and other non-sensical poems.  The salent thought - anything can appear to make sense if you a) use sentence structure or word order that implies the function of a word b) use meaninful words without proper sentence structure that force the reader to 'interpolate' the sentence (not interpret so much - I liken this to bootstraping a yield curve from implied interest rates rather than interpreting the meaning of a lowering an interest rate).

Anyway - it would not be so difficult to create a program that contained certain sentence structures and they allowed the program to plug in non-sensical words.  However, creating non-sensical words is itself an art: 

The beginning of Jabberwocky: 

`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
  Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
  And the mome raths outgrabe.

What is happening here?  What are the rules?  All the words are non-sense except for particles, conjunctions and verbs (this is more evident the further you read the poem). 'Gyre' and 'Gimble; seem to be verbs, but they act more like gerunds. First rule: nouns, gerunds, and adjectives and adverbs are non-sense words.  But all these nonsense words mimsy mome, raths - could be real words - they are pronouncable and seem almost English.  He is not creating fake arabic words but fake english words.  So Rule 2 - we need another rule defining how to create fake english words (if we are creating an english poem).  

While I was reading this chapter I kept thinking that algorithmic is a great tool for stimulating poetic thinking, a version of brainstorming.