Circumstantial Decision Making

September has been an empty month
Punctuated by a nod or a gesture.
Flow of life
A quarrel in August interrupted this
And the industry of beavers built a dam
I remember the mornings you came by,
And the dead remains of summer.
Random and continuous
Packed with your papers
Sometimes streaming from your mouth
Devoid of the normal clutter of dead leaves
Satchel in hand and bustling thoughts
And scattered papers.

Generative poetry is concerned not only with processing text but with selecting source texts to process. This curatorial gesture is of equal importance to the way in which material is handled. For this project, I decided to introduce elements of circumstance into the selection of original texts—specifically, local weather conditions. Circumstantial Decision Making is a program written in Python for generating new poems based on the current direction of the wind.

The script accesses a regularly updated database of weather variables to determine which of nine texts to process. If the wind is blowing north, it will select the text assigned to the top row, middle column. If the wind is blowing southeast, it will select the text assigned to the bottom row, right column and so on. The ninth text corresponds to “variable” wind conditions. Once selected, the program performs a basic randomization of that text’s lines, often resulting in new and interesting juxtapositions. The above example was generated with Circumstantial Decision Making from an original text by Sachiko Clayton.