Poetry News

TREND ALERT: Iambic Pentametweets

Originally Published: October 03, 2012

Check it out: a computer program known as "Pentametron" is creating strange, sometimes poignant, sometimes absurd sonnets in real time. Why? According to the creator, Ranjit Bhatnagar, the program was made "to find inadvertent poetry in the endless torrents of language that slosh around the internet."

According to the site:

These sonnets are being built in realtime by digging through hundreds of thousands of tweets per hour looking for only those few which happen to be in iambic pentameter.

...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 as a possible rhyme. Right now it's doing simple rhymed couplets, but it will learn to do full quatrains soon.

Find Pentametron here.