Towards finer-grained interaction with a Poetry Generator

PoeTryMe is a poetry generation system that produces poems autonomously, from a set of initial parameters. After using a simplified version of this system, creative writers and other interested people identified some issues and expressed their wish to make changes in the resulting poems or to interact with the system and take part in the creative process. This paper illustrates some of the issues on generated poems and reports on a recent e↵ort towards providing alternative ways of using PoeTryMe and to meet the previous suggestions. Some functionalities were made available via a web API, which can now be exploited by other systems. Those include the generation of single lines, or the retrieval of related words, where additional constrains can be made on the number of syllables, sentiment or rhyme. On the top of this API, a co-creative interface has been developed. It enables users to start from scratch, from an existing poem, or to generate a new draft.