In my essay about self-generating texts, I mentioned the possibility of using dice to generate e-poetry. For this blog post, I decided to try out this idea. For fun, I used the first stanza of the "Barney Theme Song." Since the first stanza contains eighteen words, I used a twenty sided die, rerolling if the die showed nineteen or twenty. Each word was only used once.
My chart looked like this:
- Barney
- is
- a
- dinosaur
- from
- our
- imagination
- and
- when
- he's
- tall
- he's
- what
- we
- call
- a
- dinosaur
- sensation
Here are my results:
- a
- sensation
- he's
- dinosaur
- he's
- call
- our
- and
- from
- what
- Barney
- tall
- imagination
- is
- when
- dinosaur
- we
- a
Does this new "poem" belong to me, the creators of Barney, or the dice? As I wrote in my essay, any new poetry from a text generator, whether digital or manual, should belong to the original author of the words. I highly doubt, however, that Barney or his friends are in any hurry to claim this masterpiece.