A Handful Of Rats

A  submission for Hell Yeah Poetry Jam.

What follows is a collection of poetry cowritten by myself and a neural network. Specifically, Adam King’s TalkToTransformer.com, a web interface for OpenAI’s GPT-2, model 1558M at time of writing. My process was as follows:

• Write the first line of a poem
• Feed it to TalkToTransformer.com
• Choose one line (or sentence/phrase/clause if it didn’t pick up on the line structure yet) as the next line in the poem
• Write another line to follow that one
• Use the entire poem so far as TTT’s next input
• Repeat from step 3, continuing until either TTT hits its output length limit or I feel the poem is done, whichever comes first.

This process surprised me, made me laugh out loud several times, helped me process some feelings, and write during a time when I couldn’t quite do it alone. I hope you find the same magic that I did.

Love,
Becca Edwards