Frequency Poetry Generator
Normal poem
Normal poem
Frequency is a generated poetry project written by Scott Rettberg in 2009. The poetry generator is based on 2000 human-written lines built from a tightly constrained vocabulary and arranged algorithmically into various formal structures.
The computer program was written in Ruby and has been adapted in javascript for the web. The generator can organize lines according to different constraints, including rhyme scheme, syllable count, word count, and character count.
The project includes rhymed forms such as Shakespearian, Spenserian, Petrarchan, and terza rima patterns; syllabic forms such as haiku and tanka; Oulipian snowball variations by word, syllable, and character count; and invented forms including Two Towers, Foursquare, and Doubling.
In the original project, sets of 200 poems could be generated for each form with a single terminal command, and the generator also included utilities for grouping lines by criteria the author used while composing the system.
The poems generated by Frequency are built from a pool of 2000 lines, which each use only 200 of the most used words in English. The process of writing those lines was not aided by the machine: ten lines were written beginning with each word, using only the other words in this list in the rest of the line. It is perhaps not unsurprisingly difficult to make meaningful expressions with such a limited vocabulary, but the project shows how flexible these base units of language can be.