We're excited to announce a new collaboration with Ellen Deckwitz—acclaimed poet, columnist for NRC, current city poet of Amsterdam, and recipient of the Italian Premio Ciampi for her collection Hogere Natuurkunde. For the first time, her work is being brought into a completely new context: the Poem Booth. The Poem Booth is not a traditional poetry installation. Inspired by old photo booths found in train stations, it's a machine that writes poetry—not generically, but personally. Press a button, and it generates a poem written about you. Ellen gave us access to her entire body of poetic work, not to quote, but to learn from. We worked closely with her to develop a prompt that would allow a language model to write poems inspired by her voice and tone. In our first tests, the results weren't there yet; Ellen's poetry was so precise the model struggled to replicate its clarity. By letting the model adapt the prompt based on her writing, the results became significantly more convincing. Ellen sees the Poem Booth not as a replacement, but as a new way of sharing her work. 'It's about pulling poetry out of the page,' she told us, 'and into the public space.' The first poems were presented in Italian at the Salone Internazionale del Libro in Turin, with a literary translator. Over 8,000 poems were generated in just a few days. The project was supported by the Dutch Foundation for Literature and the Dutch Embassy in Italy. Technology doesn't have to isolate. It can bring us together.
— Justus Bruns
