Episode 46: Allison Parrish
Host Rachel Zucker speaks with poet, programmer and professor, Allison Parrish. They talk about Articulations, Parrish’s first book of poetry, why she wanted to publish a book, “the threat of permanence,” Allison’s background in linguistics, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and how she made the poems in Articulations. They discuss phonemes, word vectors, semantic and phonetic similarity and proximity, and the post-processing procedures she used, as well as the ways in which computer-generated language is the same or different from “intention-typical poetry.” They also discuss J.R.R Tolkien and Gertrude Stein, not being very interested in narrative, and what Parrish hopes practitioners of computer-generated poetry will do next and what she hopes they will not do.
Books by Allison Parrish
Articulations (Counterpath, 2018)
Allison’s massive list of completed, ongoing and upcoming projects can be found on her website!
Other Books and Writers/Makers Mentioned in the Episode
Chase Berggrun’s R E D (Birds LLC, 2017)
HOME/BIRTH by Arielle Greenberg and Rachel Zucker (CreateSpace, 2017)
Virtual Muse by Charles Hartman (Wesleyan, 1996)
Louis Zukofsky’s 80 Flowers (Stinehour Press, 1978)
Reading Zukofsky’s 80 Flowers by Michele Joy Leggott (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989)
Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg (Shambhala, 2005)
Other Relevant Links
