Unconventional Inspiration: Part II
Unconventional Inspiration: Will the Man Get Frog?
Welcome to Unconventional Inspiration, a series of articles on how technology can be used to inspire poets while still emphasizing and being authored by human creativity. For the second entrant in the series, we are spotlighting the game & developer of Will the Man Get Frog (WTMGF) by Marechal Banane. You can read the first one, on Seventh Sanctum, here.
WTMGF is a game that works much like being thrown a handful of magnetic poetry to choose from. The player is given a kigo (a seasonal word– more on this in a moment), then can choose how many pronouns, nouns, verbs, auxiliary verbs (helping verbs such as, to be, to have, to do), adverbs, and adjectives they’d like to generate, up to 30 words. Once the creation phase begins, they’re sorted by category, and the player can drag and manipulate words into arrangements of haiku. The haiku can then be exported as an animated GIF with a number of pixel-art backgrounds.
Banane’s haiku follows the English language guidelines of using a five-seven-five syllable division by line and requiring the use of a kigo somewhere in the poem. Traditional Japanese haiku have no syllable count but demand the use of a kigo, specific words and concepts associated with nature and traditions, amongst other structural rules.
Kigo are culturally specific and oft-debated as to how to be utilized in English-language poetry. Banane’s choices regarding kigo were as follows:
They were all handpicked one by one, starting with the utmost necessary (auxiliaries, pronouns, verbs of the most common actions, and basic concepts like good/bad, short/long, etc.), and then gradually expanding from here. Each added word was to unlock as much expression potential as possible, so I favored simple words, mostly everyday things, carrying high or diverse symbolic and semantic value. So things like "bridge" or "fair" felt right, whereas "embargo" or "stipulate" felt too precise and less evocative. Another constraint helped a ton: restricting the dictionary to only one-syllable words, to guarantee that assembling 17 words would automatically result in a 5-7-5 format.
Banane described a range of responses to the game, affectionately describing it as, “chaos, but a very cheerful and lively one”; players have written everything from more personal confessions to more surrealist-near-gibberish poems and, despite the game’s absence of sexual language, erotic poems, reminiscent of e.e. Cummings in their stilted language.
The game does not create a distinction regarding how words or parsing can be used as kireji, ‘cuttings-words’ that create a pause or pivot within the poem, but that feature of haiku is not always adopted in the English language tradition. Arguably, the syllable count in English often serves to create this effect.
The name comes from a haiku written by Banane using the game:
three sweet dogs can be
fall is dog walk with dog girl
will the man get frog
Banane’s info can be found ontheir website. Otherwise, you can follow Banane on Bluesky, play WTMGF On Steam, or check out their itch.io page.
Senia Hardwick holds an MFA from Queens College and teaches full-time. Their first book "An Exchange in Demonology: Improvement of the Self and Others" is available from CLOAK. You can also find more of their work at www.seniahardwick.neocities.org and on IG @necro.pharmakon.
