Collocation: a poem culled from cruft


Data-art involves days of futile searches. Redundant processes, meandering through archives trying to retrieve relevant results. In this case, a collocation search resulted (as usual) in 99% pure cruft.

Cruft may be a synonym for poetry: the craft of recycling phenomenological debris into revelations.

Process: a trigram collocation search [in other words, a search for 3 words together] of 10,573 poems from the Poetry Foundation.

Filtered for the most frequent 3 word phrases:
before filter: 2,654,603 phrases,
after filter: 532,852 phrases.

Sample:

idle fears! Vanish
idle flitting phantasies,
idle hand sweeping
idle handle, resting 

joys Of sense
joys Of serving
joys Of subtler ... love I fell love I fill love I had.  milk & sugar milk . . milk And blood milk From burning ... sexual feud And sexual grove.  time, I climbed time, I cut

Read it here

Generated on 2014-07-27 at 16h
Selected at 2014-07-28 at 14h

 
Screen Shot 2014-07-26 at 4.07.09 pm
 
言 I love 
fiction. Such designs, 
file box That 
find you, Puckered, 
fire. Wet branches 
first branch, Dad, 
first light 45 
first magpies, governmental 
first principles assigns 
first sight-- I 
five minutes. Then 
fixed flamboyance Good 
flamboyance Good versus 
flat. The vanishing 
flattened it. A 
fleet His war 
flesh swells Closed 
flesh transparent, see-through, 
flew past, Rodez, 
fly's dysenteric violin.
, ,