In recent months, I’ve written a couple of times about online poetry generators. But now I’ve found a physical computational device — a poetry calculator called the Verse-O-Matic. The prototype was created by James Robinson, a student at the Interactive Technologies Program at New York University, and as Robinson describes on his site, it works like this:

The Verse-O-Matic looks almost exactly like a regular printing calculator, although the digits are replaced by nine themes (love, happiness, beauty, humor, age, nature, separation, sadness, and despair). When a key is pressed, the calculator searches its memory to select all of the 70 poems in memory that refer to that theme. Additional themes can be added (“+” = AND) or subtracted (“-” = AND NOT) from the poetic equation simply by pressing the appropriate keys. When the user presses “=”, the equation is completed and the calculator prints a poem that fulfills all of the thematic boundaries that the user has set.

For instance:

Love
+
Separation
-
Sadness
=
“This bud of love, by summer’s ripening breath,
May prove a beauteous flower when next we meet.”
[William Shakespeare]