One further thing I want to talk about as it pertains to the Poetry Playground project I mentioned earlier.

Many, well… actually most… of my ideas for interesting transformations came from reading thousands (really) of Reddit haiku. There were a couple of failure modes I found.

• sentences: If each line can stand independently without the poem collapsing into one flat sentence, you’re often in good shape.
• line jam: a very common failure mode is that a Reddit poet just throws three random things together. Often these are gestures towards profundity of some sort, but it’s not uncommon for them to just be bizarre mutations of language.
• weak L3: probably the most common problem with Reddit haiku. Reddit haiku doesn’t really know about “a turn” and often the poem runs out of steam after L2. So L3 just throws its hands up like “LIFE, AMIRITE???” and exits stage left.
• bridging L2: this one is less common. You have limited space in a haiku to get your point across so if all you do in L2 is pass the time until you get to L3, your poem would have been better off without that line at all.
• L3-L1 swap: I can’t believe how much this one appears. If swapping L1 and L3 doesn’t break the poem, that’s a problem.

• You choose a word. It’s best to choose a bridging word like “therefore”, but really any word can work.
• You choose a number of sentence pairs to return.
• The system then finds instances of your chosen word amongst the Project Gutenberg corpus.
• It extracts the sentence before and after the sentence in which your word appeared, discarding the sentence in which your word appeared entirely. This is sampling the context.
• Optionally, it can transform the sentences through another thing I have called the “Ship of Theseus” transformer (adds flavor).

This feature was driven entirely by my realization of the bridging L2 phenomenon I mentioned earlier. The results are amazing. Lots of awkward fractures, strange plot twists, and impossible shifts.