HaikU

• 1. Introduction

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  haikU, created by Nanette Wylde in 2001, is a browser-based poetry project with a deceptively simple premise: arrive at its web page and a haiku appears. Reload the page and another poem forms. It was written using cgi with html and perl, the tools of early internet programming, and it invites anyone on the internet to add their own lines to its ever-growing database. The poems you read were written by no single person and yet, according to the scholar Scott Rettberg, roughly eighty percent of them cohere quite well as poetry. How does a machine shuffle fragments from strangers and produce something that reads as if a single human mind composed it? That question sits at the heart of what haikU does, and it is a question the project has been asking since the earliest years of the open web.

• 2. How the Machine Writes

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  Each poem haikU displays follows the English five-seven-five syllabic structure of the haiku form. The project maintains three separate repositories of lines, one for the opening five-syllable lines, one for the seven-syllable middle lines, and one for the closing five-syllable lines. When a reader loads the page, the system draws one line at random from each repository and assembles them into a poem. No two poems repeat upon refresh, and the opening page offers buttons to generate a new poem, to contribute lines, and to learn more about haiku as a form. On occasion, lines in languages other than English appear, a small sign of the project's genuinely international audience. Wylde herself describes haikU as an homage to early internet programmers who built the first web-based, audience-participatory, creative works, often in the form of haiku generators.

• 3. A Collective Authorship

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  Scott Rettberg, a scholar of electronic literature, observed that no single author determines which lines will appear together in any given poem. Readers who follow the link to "Write haiku" can submit their own three-line haiku, with each line posted separately to the appropriate bin. What the site then delivers is not any reader's original haiku but a recombination pulled from across those bins. The result is poetry, as Rettberg put it, "neither completely determined by any human nor free of authorial intention." The fairly subtle instructions Wylde gives contributors, combined with the fixed syllabic structure of the haiku form, quietly guide the database toward lines that can survive unexpected neighbors. Contributors write individual lines, not knowing which other contributors' lines will flank them.

• 4. The Reader as Co-Creator

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  A reviewer quoted in the project's reception described haikU as feeling open-ended and personal, allowing readers to make their own connections between poems or to make no connections at all. That latitude transforms the reader into something closer to a co-creator. A critic identified as Star noted that each haiku a viewer encounters has a first, last, and only meaning breathed into it in that moment, because people are constantly adding new lines and the same combination may never surface again. Star argued that Wylde intends for her interactive audience to create their own ties and breaks where it seems organic. This framing places haikU within a broader tradition of electronic literature where, as one reviewer put it, the reader's interpretation becomes a part of the work itself.

• 5. Place in Electronic Literature

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  haikU is taught in college-level electronic literature courses and has received critical attention from both the electronic literature community and contemporary art writers. Rettberg described it as an early example of internet coding for creative output and situated it alongside other works concerned with user participation and randomizing functions. The project's combination of human-written lines and an arbitrary selection structure was, in his view, remarkable for how often it produced poems that read as if individually intended by a human intelligence. The fact that an eighty-percent coherence rate emerged from a simple cgi script and a growing, uncoordinated pool of contributors points to something the haiku form itself may be uniquely suited to: its brevity and tight syllabic rules leave little room for a line to become incoherent, which means the database self-corrects toward legibility with every new submission.