Categories
From the Web

Introducing the New Yorker Poetry Bot – From The New Yorker

Following up on our recent post from The New York Times about apps that infiltrate your social media feeds to get your out of your “bubble,” this new app from the New Yorker steps into your social feed to insert poetry. 

It seems interesting that while the name for these technologies, Social Media, implies social interaction, increasingly tools such as the apps we’re discussing this week and last are decidedly antisocial. They’re lines of code that have little to do with our friends or our social sphere. These algorithmic incursions, like Netflix’s suggestions which embody their own biases, are thought to be neutral (although to be fair, this poetry bot uses poetry collected by The New Yorker‘s Poetry Editor, so it’s not an algorithm in the same way as Amazon’s suggestions are). 

It is interesting to think about how we cultivate our social media “feeds” and what each of them represent as we engage, sometimes socially, with these lines of communication, often on our own, alone. — Social Mediums

To celebrate the magazine’s ninety-second anniversary, we are introducing The New Yorker Poetry Bot, a new way to receive, read, listen to, and share poetry. Starting today, our poetry bot, available on Twitter and Facebook Messenger, will send out a poetry excerpt at random every day for the next ninety-two days. The selection—culled from our archive and curated by our poetry editor, Paul Muldoon, and poetry coördinator, Elisabeth Denison—includes poems by Audre Lorde, Joseph Brodsky, and Ada Limón. The bot’s first release is from our inaugural year: “Cassandra Drops Into Verse,” a poem by the early contributor and Algonquin roundtable wit, Dorothy Parker.

Some poems, like this one by Ocean Vuong, feature audiograms of the poet’s reading.

The New Yorker Poetry Bot was developed in collaboration with Courtney Stanton and Darius Kazemi. They are the same artist-coders who crafted @staywokebot, a tool for activists in the form of a Twitter bot, and Madam Eva, an interactive fortune-telling bot that ran on the Dungeons & Dragons Twitter account. Kazemi, working under the name Tiny Subversions, also created the Harry Potter-themed @SortingBot, which generated rhyming quatrains that placed followers into a Hogwarts house.

Follow The New Yorker Poetry Bot using the instructions below.

Facebook Messenger:

Click here to install the bot. When prompted, select the Messenger App. Click “Get Started” and you’ll be asked what time of day you’d like to receive your daily poem—morning (9 A.M.), afternoon (1 P.M.), evening (7 P.M.), or night (10 P.M.). Once you select your delivery time, you’ll receive your first poem excerpt, with a link to read and/or listen to the poem in full on newyorker.com. The next poem will arrive at the time you selected.

To stop receiving messages, respond with the word “Stop” at any time. If you want to continue to receive poems, do not delete this conversation.

Twitter:

Follow @tnypoetry. Once you follow the bot, it will tweet an excerpt of a poem at you, with a link to read and/or listen to the poem in full on newyorker.com. After that initial tweet, you’ll see tweets from the bot in your Twitter feed once a day. The tweet won’t @-message the poem to individual users, so if you’re not looking at your timeline at the time it’s sent, you’ll need to scroll to get it.

To stop seeing tweets from the bot, simply unfollow @tnypoetry.

 

Source: Introducing the New Yorker Poetry Bot – The New Yorker