an english syllabic kasen

The Renga Machine

seed —

About this machine — what it does, and what it does not.

A kasen is a thirty-six-verse Japanese linked-verse form: poets alternate long verses (5-7-5) and short ones (7-7), each linking to the verse before it and turning away from the one before that, across a governed arc of seasons — with fixed seats where the moon and the cherry blossom must appear. This is an English syllabic adaptation: English syllables stand in for Japanese on (mora), which are not the same unit. It is not classical renga. It is a machine built in renga's shape.

The verses here are written by hand. The machine does not compose poetry. It holds eighty-nine hand-authored verses and does the genuinely hard part — sequencing them into a kasen that obeys every rule: the syllable counts (dictionary-verified), the moon and blossom seats (checked against the actual words of the poem, not merely a label — an earlier version of this machine passed its own check while naming the moon off its seat, and that is the kind of quiet dishonesty this one was rebuilt to refuse), the seasonal runs, the love that must arrive and not linger, and the shift that must carry each verse away from the one two back. A kasen that fails any check is never shown to you.

What it honestly is not: the link between one verse and the next is a real authored association about half the time; the rest are legal turns that do not sing. Each new draw is a different sequencing of the same eighty-nine verses, not a new poem made from nothing. The machine's craft is in the sequence and the rule-keeping. The beauty, where you find any, was put there by a hand.