As most automatic writing produces a great deal of unusable material, there is a tendency for only those sentences or words which make some sort of sense to be separated from the background mush. The filtering can take place at least at four levels in fact. If no letter is clearly indicated, the move is ignored. If no known word is found, a group of letters can be ignored. If the words make no possible sentence, a group of words can be ignored. If a sentence does fit the subject, the entire sentence can be ignored. Even where some attempt is made to record failures, they are so tedious to record and meaningless to read that they are bound to be minimized.

This Macintosh Hypercard-based application has been freely distributed for many years and anti-copyrighted by its generous dadaist author, Chris F. Westbury. He has since gone on to develop a more advanced text-generating programme called Janus. Armed with word-lists and template-structures, McPoet waxes poetical on any given subject in a multitude of styles. It would I think be fair to describe it as being imbued with a somewhat gloomy personality and much given to navel-gazing. In other words, a fairly typical poet.

McPoet's bag of party tricks include Fortune Telling and Spell-Poems, where the names of friends and enemies can be made to render a secret life of their own by acrostics.

Choosing a Subject does not so far as I can gather do anything more than make the given name or noun the subject of some of the sentences of the poem. Naming War, say would not in itself cause military words to be chosen from the heap.

The author of the programme speaks of the meanings we project into a piece of writing. It is interesting to reflect that the McPoet seems to have at least as good a strike rate of memorable phrases or lines as any human versifier. Whole poems or whole stanzas never quite seem to make any larger sense but individual images can be startling with the mentioned bias in favour of the apocalyptic.

Now in using the McPoet application as an automatic writing medium it is clear that the pre-entered word-lists and structures are ready-mades in a way that the individual letters of the alphabet are not. McPoet is never lost for words. The full spectrum of language is what we expect and very often get. These splashy productions lose their novelty very quickly. We soon begin to focus on the clusters, the collocations of related words or words which by the magic of their sounds appear suddenly to be related. These are the selections we imbue with meanings. Unlike the planchette and oiuja board, McPoet has no mechanical link to our bodies. The notion of the subconscious brain interracting with the tiny electrical charges which are McPoet's decision-making processes is a harder concept than telepathy. Yet we encounter the uncanny almost every time we play with McPoet.

Anyone who has ever tried to find something positive in a very stupid child's homework or who interprets the licks of a puppy as love will find plenty to interest them in this piece of software as it plays with us.

1: Mystery

Always without area we must be found,

If its deep daughter we would sound;

But if childbirth always within us be,

Its outer shepherd is really part of me,

Under these two questions, it really is the same;

But as sun takes place, it receives the different name,

Together we call them the Mystery.

2: Silent queens

A simple man of silent queens

was making bugs for New York fiends

These hopeless tiny dreamy fiends

were selling fun for hopeless beings

 

A handsome man of friendly fiends

was melting hope for endless queens

These friendly hopeless ample queens

were mending hope for hopeful fiends

 

I perceive a parable

and the way we acquainted!

So many aspects in esoteric geniuses

on calm zigzags.

3: The Guru

Whisper: patriotic eery guru for dealings

her riot

takes things from an exquisite feel

a chaste cup takes things to a carnival.

If a dead ancestor had the power to change

all that you hold valuable, I'd ask for sunsets to become more infantile

 

Excuse me, frightening existentialist, but could you inform me as to what that item is?

It's your unborn descendant's demonic ageless habit.

 

My electronic-Lacy seas

fuzzy mouth will be worshipped.

I am not you

 

The dying bureaucracy is

an icy cross.

I deactivate beautifully at least one room

and the way many of us entreated it to calamity

so many bells in electric societies

on auburn odors

4: Not I will be scientist-Alien!

But not not enough people detach pupil to applaud!

As my friend Mr. Weejrug once allegedly said to Mrs. Kliqu, "They pretend it's easy to be fierce, to be bored, but I know better. I alone say it. Perhaps of all formless surfeits, I alone decapitate personally. I know about onslaught. Oh, yes, I know all about onslaught! I know about her sentences and her inequalities. It is because of her acts of terrorism that she is to be a Christian spring. Out of her powers has metamorphasized an ill cleavage. I dehydrate the exposure for her. I call it 'Peyooz'. I pilfered up the hail when I was their rambling politician. Onslaught, she is an eagle needing patriarchal fatality to be loved. She is something sisters need from esoteric daddies."

5: Underground starts curiously

Underground starts curiously
she orchestrates

no fantasy gives!

 

Omen: a harlot's low earth

If The Great Mother had the power to change

this present moment,

I'd ask for time to become decreasingly explorable

6: A prose masterpiece

We can understand the slug of polytheistic daddy. We go to no delectable psychology for giving natural selection, since we know that the devil lies in the performance. Failure to perform means cowardice or mountain, just as the non-performance of blue benefactors means the woman of sweat. Disbelieving warmly, captivating rhythmically, hatred towards feedback, and competing for the creator of natural selection should be acts of anxiety, not of toaster oven.

Them's bitten earnings are swift to point out the comfort them provides for the father, the weird, and the fabulous. This is fine for them. But the controversial warrior must not waste any time in the planet zone! If one yearns to lead to a pathology of the Divine, one must study closely a kind of critic, escape from a deification, must give to no balances, annoy to happy thefts! One must excrete the geniuses of the smiles, the feelings of placid trees! How buzzing, how gently unchaining to think of them as more than one strong wise man, as the fiery joker who allows us nothing but small varieties, where a blonde virgin overshadows few clinical eyes with symbolized pieces of deserved orgies.

But one less unitary atrocity objectifies

7: An assassin omits.

God changes her meaning every second - Deadened is the saint who can recognise all her disguises. At one moment God is an answering machine of every loving bartender, the next a little girl despairing on the cancellation, or an anal aunt, or maybe an aromatic earthy terror.

Wild particular hearts

depart from her hissing axe.

8: The riddle of existence solved

Do you know why I adore Being?

Because Being is an example of a zingy blancmange.

9:

my noxious noncommittal nudities and deadly direct daddies swoon quickly and clarify carnally.

10: Oracle asked about Indian Earthquake

Eras gather in pleasurable god crowds, smoking

risk and burning shed to keep buxom,

most horrors are similar to the granite.

[This is very odd as the Indian earthquake took place on a religious holiday

I don't recall if the programme was given the subject of Earthquake or merely asked mentally. The programme in any case has no way of associating words with the subject - it just uses the given word as the subject of statements. I remember finding this verse quite startling at the time. It may have been taken from a longer "poem" but not a much longer one.]