Frequency is a poetry generator written in Ruby, and part of a larger constrained writing process. The lines of all the poems in Frequency are constrained by the fact that I used only 200 of the most common English words in them. The poems generated by Frequency are built from a pool of 2000 lines I wrote. The process of writing the lines was not aided by the machine and was painstaking work. I wrote a set of ten lines beginning with each word, only using 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 in the end I was surprised by how flexible these base units of our language can be. The poetry generator itself runs from a command line interface, and can algorithmically assemble poems according to a number of different rhyme scheme, syllabic, and spatial criteria. For the the 2009 Grand Text Auto Exhibition at the Krannert Center at the University of Illinois, I developed a routine within the generator that could produce a large collection of poems with one command, and then produced a set of 2000 variants of Frequency poems that will cycle for a long period in a web-browser-based installation demonstrating some poetry produced by the program.
(Source: Author's description)
