Philosopher Sally Haslanger reflects on life through a poem by Wislawa Szymborska Continue reading

October 13, 2022
by Aesthetics for Birds
0 comments
October 13, 2022
by Aesthetics for Birds
0 comments
Philosopher Sally Haslanger reflects on life through a poem by Wislawa Szymborska Continue reading
September 15, 2022
by Aesthetics for Birds
2 Comments
An analysis of the intricacies of how alternative text is used to communicate fundamentally visual information in a linguistic mode. Continue reading
July 20, 2017
by Aesthetics for Birds
0 comments
Google Translate’s Emergent Poetry Some of you will be familiar with computer poetry, poetic compositions generated by computers using algorithms. Some of you may even be familiar with computer prose, as the book The Policeman’s Beard is Half Constructed (text here). There are lots of things to say about this. Who’s the author? Is it really poetry? And what does it say if computer poetry passes the Turing test? Last week, I stumbled upon something new in this neighborhood, care of Google Translate. You might think this would be generated by inputting something funny (but promising if you think about it) like assembly instructions or political speeches–or even something translated into a different language, then translated back. Instead, this Google Translate poetry takes as input a single, repeated Japanese hiragana character. As you can see above, the returns are surreal and delightful. (For all of these, I’ve used ‘ke’, け.) See here and here for … Continue reading
October 10, 2013
by Aesthetics for Birds
2 Comments
What follows is an interview with poet David Orr. David is the poetry columnist for the New York Times Book Review. His first book, Beautiful & Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry, was named one of the twenty best books of 2011 by The Chicago Tribune. Orr is the winner of the Nona Balakian Prize from the National Book Critics Circle and the Editor’s Prize for Reviewing from Poetry magazine. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Slate, Poetry magazine, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Believer, among other publications. He holds a B.A. from Princeton and a J.D. from Yale Law School.