The Electric Poetry Machine is a poetry generator application that takes lines of poetry and splices them together to create small bespoke poems.
It was created specifically for people living in North Yorkshire and the local areas of Redcar and Cleveland and Middlesbrough to share poems with one another during the pandemic.
"Whether it be the sweeping eagle in his flight, or the open apple-blossom, the toiling work-horse, the blithe swan, the branching oak, the winding stream at its base, the drifting clouds, over all the coursing sun, form ever follows function, and this is the law. Where function does not change, form does not change. The granite rocks, the ever-brooding hills, remain for ages; the lightning lives, comes into shape, and dies, in a twinkling."
A poem, just like a chair, a wing-mirror, a sculpture, a skyscraper, a leaflet, or a painting, has a form that is part of its design. We often look at poems this way, discovering the music in alliteration and rhyme, or space between verses that offer a moment to pause or perhaps a moment of vertigo.
Form in poetry is part of a poem's engine, driving the language and its inherent meaning. So, as a poet, part of the artistic practice is to look at forms carefully and to explore their potential. Like an architect, we consider the load-bearing potential of lines and verses. We see how the language can be cantilevered by open spaces and we think about how the eye will wander through and how the imagination will follow.
