Digital found poem Songs of my pathetic self is a random poetry generator that is the envy of AI (artificial intelligence). 
Although IA can make use of almost the entire world-wide corpus of poetry to try to generate new poems, Digital found poem Songs of my pathetic self can only use a minuscule fraction of that corpus. But unfortunately for AI, it can only use insufficiently poetic algorithms, whereas Digital found poem Songs of my pathetic self can use human intelligence (me!) to find/write the bits and piece of language that go into generating my random poems. And that does give Digital found poem Songs of my pathetic self just a bit of a poetic edge.
Now AI has an advantage in that you can ask it to write a poem about any subject you want—a love poem, a poem about a rose, a free verse version of a sonnet, etc. Digital found poem Songs of my pathetic self can only generate one type of poem– sad ones, about the human condition, as it’s experienced by a moody, first-person narrator and his/her lover. Hence the name, “Songs of my pathetic self.”
To see the difference between AI and me, try this. Have AI generate a few poems for you, which you can do at AI Poem Generator. Then look at Ten examples of Songs of my pathetic self, which is a PDF showing ten poems that I’ve generated. Now compare, and I think you’ll see that the poems generated by Digital found poem Songs of my pathetic self are just a little better that what AI can produce on the same topic. That may, of course, change in a few years as IA continues its education and becomes better and better at generating better stuff.
If you want to generate some poems of your own using Digital found poem Songs of my pathetic self, you can find the instruction at Download Songs of my pathetic self.
Important: To run Songs of my pathetic self, your computer must be able to run Windows. Songs of my pathetic self doesn’t work on cell phones. And it works on Mac and other operating system devices only if they can also run Windows.
Songs of my pathetic self is an extremely simple, single-file text editor (think Windows Notepad) that won’t add cookies, mess with your registry, or collect any personal information. If you download it and it’s not to your liking, you can delete it in one second with a single click.
To see what the user-interface of Songs of my pathetic self looks like, what the generated poems look like, and the editing capabilities included, watch this 3-minute video.
Using Songs of my pathetic self in the classroom
Note: Although Songs of my pathetic self doesn’t contain “four-letter” words, it’s intended for a mature audience. Its dark and adult themes make it inappropriate for those too young for all that misery.
If you’re a poetry teacher and are looking for a way to spice up your poetry writing class or workshop, Songs of my pathetic self may be of help. Let students play with the found poems, shaping and molding words and lines that they see poetic potential in and discarding the rest. (Think cut ups, erasure poems, blackout/redacted poems, found poems, and so on.)* For a beginning poet, a few minutes of tinkering with text provided may be a more enjoyable and productive way to start each writing day than to have to stare at that proverbial blank page and hope that, somehow, the words will come.
* For an interesting take on the value of cut ups, erasures, etc, see the @heteroglossia blog entry for February 17, 2019, which (in part) says:
Cut up, erasure, projectivist, free verse — many of these forms and schools, by taking verse, lines, conceits from past works, force us to see the intertextual nature that constitutes all writing. When, say, one “cuts,” rearranges, or erases a poem to bring to light another, possible poem, one illuminates the infinite possibility of language, the infinity of language. The poem lying in wait behind (or above, or to the left or right of) the poem.
Songs of my pathetic self is essentially just a gigantic “cut up.” But instead of cutting up a single existing work, it cuts up a huge chunk of the dictionary and of the spoken/written English language. It then rearranges the “cut up” pieces programmatically into an infinite variety of never-before-seen stanzaic text that students (or anyone else) can peruse to find/fashion new poems that may be “lying in wait behind (or above, or to the left or right of” the digitally generated text. And what they find or fashion, they may, of course, keep and call their own.
