Translations of an Algorithmic Love Poemby Katherine Swett

Translations of an Algorithmic Love Poem

Katherine Swett

"But one day [Wolf] found the skin of a sheep that had been flayed and thrown aside, so it put it on over its own pelt and strolled down among the sheep. The lamb that belonged to the sheep... began to follow." —Aesop's Fables

Output 1

I follow Wolf. My eyes.

One day, my arms full
and your skin of wolf words—

skin the natural language ability—

they called me the wolf in the sheep
because [I'm] one dimensional
semantically and dead.

I of no shepherd
comprehending my eyes

Output 4

One day I found
[the] size of words.

Neither Living nor dead,
Wolf gave me hyacinths.

I, neither Living nor dead,
[have] great difficulty
in processing.

Still they called me "[she]
whose true skin, the wolf,
is mostly based on nothing."

Looking into the lamb,
I could not. And my eyes failed.

Wolf succeeded in deceiving
me, whom he fashioned into,
[or out of], his own coat.

Output 3

I knew nothing,
looking the skin of
the natural
language ability.

your arms skin
of a sheep, patterns
beautiful as correlations,
and your hair

wet meal of her
many lambs

Output 5

So leading, the heart began
to follow the size of words.

They called me the sheep, and
They called me the wolf.

Put it on, [the size].

And your tailored hair
wandered among the sheep.

I [was] the wolf patterns
feeding on the heart of light,

a meal of your many fundamental questions,
arms full and your—

Katherine Swett received her BS in Mathematics from Virginia Tech in 2009 and an MFA in poetry at George Mason in 2012. She is now pursuing both her passion for language and science through a Neuroscience fellowship at Vanderbilt University, in which she studies neural processing of children with reading disabilities.

As part of her series "Translations of an Algorithmic Love Poem," these pieces were generated with the help of a Matlab script written by Katherine, which uses a random number generator to collage different input texts. Sources include Aesop's "Wolf in Sheep's Clothing", excerpts from T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land", and excerpts from EG Altmann et al., "On the origin of long-range correlations in texts".

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