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If you’re trying to be the next E.E. Cummings or Emily Dickinson but can’t find the right turn of phrase, the Jaden and Willow Smith Poetry Generator might be a good place to start.
All you have to do is drag and drop little tidbits from the siblings’ much-publicized recent sitdown with The New York Times “to discuss prana energy, the experience of time and the meaning of art,” and you’re guaranteed a poem that’ll make you sound like you’ve been giving some very deep thought to duality consciousness, universal truths and driver’s ed. “Let the famous Hollywood siblings be your inspiration,” trumpets the amusing new online tool from Time magazine’s interactive graphics editor Chris Wilson and assistant managing editor Samuel P. Jacobs.
Here’s one of my creations:
this is a fragment, inside all our minds we make our own music little moments of inspiration, a holographic reality a place of oneness a thing that you can get lost in totally
The teenage offspring of Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith granted their first joint interview to the Times’ T Magazine on the occasion of their new albums coming out. Since being published Monday, the piece has provided some of the most quoted soundbites of today (Tuesday, that is, not modern times). Among the revelations contained therein:
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Willow Smith, 14, is currently reading quantum physics, while her brother Jaden, 16, is making his way through “‘The Ancient Secret of the Flower of Life’ and ancient texts; things that can’t be pre-dated.”
They also talk about the nature of time. “I mean, time for me, I can make it go slow or fast, however I please, and that’s how I know it doesn’t exist,” Willow says. Adds Jaden: “It’s proven that how time moves for you depends on where you are in the universe. It’s relative to beings and other places.”
The interview’s been called crazy, outrageous and incomprehensible and deconstructed by the likes of ABC News and the Washington Post. But in fairness, the young Smiths do say plenty of things that sound completely down to teenage earth. Jaden, for example, reveals a fondness for Final Cut Pro and Logic, and Willow talks about how she makes music (she starts with the beat and then goes from there).
But it’s the less, um, grounded phrases that make for an entertaining Jaden and Willow Poetry Generator, which can also produce poems at random for you if you’re not feeling up for literary legwork. Here’s the random poem it wrote for me:
you can talk and talk putting all their bones together the most craziest person of all time here on earth you never learn anything in school
Are you listening Norton Anthology of Poetry?
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