FEATURE: 'Love to Hear the Robin go Tweet Tweet Tweet'
One of the joys of literature and poetry is its ability to let us savor different emotional worlds for a moment, allowing us to plumb the emotional states of people very different from ourselves. With rhythm, juxtaposition of words and modes of thought, the poet lets us escape for an instant from the bonds of our own emotional world, allowing access to another person's state of mind using an amalgam of ambiguity, symbolism, irony and meter. Our greatest poets had the ability to make these connections through the power of their creative imaginations. Over the years there have been experiments to 'automatically' create such poetry by randomly generating verse via algorithm. The product of such experiments was mostly absurd gibberish with the occasional gem being randomly generated.
An internet version of such a random verse-generating algorithm is a program called Pentametron, a program randomly creating thousands of rhyming couplets by matching up pairs of rhyming tweets that were, by chance, written in iambic pentameter. The verse generated by this program creates many absurd, nonsensical parings, but it also creates some very funny and surprisingly affecting, poignant images.
Pentametron takes each of the 30-60 tweets it receives each second, and looks up each word in a dictionary which lists the stress patterns of every word. If the rhythms of all the words put together seem to add up to iambic pentameter, Pentametron considers the tweet a possible rhyme.
The rhyming couplets below were built in realtime by digging through hundreds of thousands of tweets per hour looking for only those few which happened to be in iambic pentameter. These tweets are retweeted on the @pentametron twitter feed and collected on the website www.pentametron.com.
We have chosen a few of the recently generated 'couplets' we like best:
Depression is a living, breathing thing
I kinda wanna watch the Lion king
Rage, rage against the dying of the light
I'm never tired on a Sunday night
Beware the fury of a patient man
Mom , Dad and Sister moving to Japan
Love Doesn't Have An Expiration Date
I'm bending over backwards to relate
Mistakes were made a couple years ago
Dad's birthday, Wednesday, didn't even know
Lies ALWAYS change... The Truth REMAINS the same
I will remain a keeper of the flame
It's gonna be a crazy day today!
Revolt against the honor to obey
You gotta operate the easy way
I dream about the future everyday
It was a bad idea from the start
She really made a bathroom cleaning chart
I'm just the shadow of a bigger man
Am now a member of the iPhone clan
Another boy without a sharper knife
Weak people Neva get ahead in life
Can't even hoop today because the snow
Turn up the music till the speakers blow
I miss the old A Rocket To The Moon
Yay going to the chiropractor soon
I wonder what tomorrow has in store
I'm going crazy over Jersey Shore
My baby's birthday is a month away
I had a party for myself today
Just like in chess, the Queen protects the King
My parents always ruin everything
