Poetry in Public: A New Collaboration with Ellen Deckwitz

VOUW has partnered with Ellen Deckwitz, an acclaimed Dutch poet and current Amsterdam city poet, to introduce the Poem Booth — an innovative installation inspired by vintage train station photo booths. Rather than capturing images, this machine generates personalized poems about users who interact with it.

Deckwitz, known for her precise and emotionally resonant work, provided her complete poetic body to inform the project. The team developed a sophisticated prompt that allowed a language model to learn from her voice and style. Initial attempts struggled with the complexity of her layered writing, but allowing the model to adapt the prompt based on her work yielded stronger results.

Poetry Pulled from the Page

“It's about pulling poetry out of the page and into the public space,” Deckwitz explained. The Poem Booth functions as a public encounter rather than solitary interaction — people read generated poems aloud together, creating shared moments of connection.