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Diastic Poem Generator

How does it work?

  1. It grabs the first letter of each word in 'Seed Text'.
  2. It grabs the first word it can find in 'Source Text' that also starts with that letter.
  3. When it finds a match, it adds the word from 'Source Text' to the poem.

This is similiar to an Acrostic poem, where the first letter of each line will spell out words or each word of each line will create a message.




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"In an endnote to [The Virginia Woolf Poems], Jackson [Mac Low] explained the "diastic" or "spelling-through" technique he had used in writing the poems. The process began with a striking phrase from Virginia Woolf's The Waves: "ridiculous in Picadilly." He reread the novel, looking for the first word that, like "ridiculous," began with an r; then read the next word following that had (like "ridiculous") i as its second letter; then the next whose third letter was d; and so on until he had "spelled through" the whole phrase. (There were other rules for line breaks, punctuation, and so on.) The resulting text would be made entirely out of Woolf's words but would have none of the usual English syntax."

- Charles O. Hartman, Virtual Muse: experiments in computer poetry

charNG character n-gram generator, provided by eddeaddad, xradiographer