“Frequency” by Scott Rettberg and the machine (part 1 of 5)

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Title accompanied by a wave diagram, both in white against a black background. Black text on a gray rectangle. Text: "FREQUENCY WORD LIST 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 of and a to in is you that it he was for on are as with his they I at be this have from or one had by word"
Open “Frequency” by Scott Rettberg and the machine (part 1 of 5)

The “Frequency” project is an investigation into Oulipian constraint-based writing in several levels:

  1. A linguistically determined lexicon of the 200 most frequently used words in the English language— an endeavor that is already built upon the constraint of the corpus that analysis is based upon: Oxford Online and Google have both famously made such analyses, with massive and different data sets.
  2. Rettberg then wrote 10 lines of verse beginning with each word, using only the words on the list, for a total of 2000 lines of verse. This alone is a massive creative endeavor which he describes as “painstaking work.”
  3. He analyzed these lines to develop a data set, organized in arrays based on the following variables: frequency rank of initial word, rhyming end words, number of syllables per word, number of syllables per line, number of words per line, and lines per string length (number of characters, including spaces).
  4. The analysis embedded in these arrays allowed Rettberg to write algorithms to generate 200 instances of 10 different kinds of formally constrained poems, some from well established poetic traditions, one developed by the OULIPO, and three he developed himself.

The version published online (linked to above) is a set of 2000 poems (200 poems for each of the 10 poetic forms) generated by the program he wrote in Ruby (used in steps 3 & 4 above). Each poem is in an HTML page with a JavaScript timer that randomly redirects the browser to a new poem or one of three informative pages about the project every 30 seconds. This lends itself to a meandering exploration of the poems, as well as for an installation of the work. I like to have a second screen hooked up to my laptop computer with “Frequency” on a fullscreen browser window, allowing me to read it from time to time.

More systematic approaches to reading it are also available, such as deleting the name of the .html file on the browser’s address bar to get a directory listing of all 200 poems in that form, or manually changing the number value to read more generated works in that style. Even allowing the work to run for a while and use the back button on your browser to produce a list you can select from is a way to read more selectively.

However you choose to read the poems generated by this project, there is one question that hasn’t been addressed yet by this posting. Are the poems any good? How successful is the result of this obsessively recursive creative investigation of constrained writing?

Over the next four entries, I will perform systematic readings of the poems produced by this project, considering how effectively they engage the poetic traditions they formally embody, organized as follows:

Short (Japanese) forms:

  • tanka
  • haiku

Longer (European) forms:

  • Terza rima
  • Petrarchan sonnet
  • Spenserian sonnet

Oulipian forms:

  • snowball (by character)
  • snowball (by word)
  • doubling (an original form based on the snowball)

Original forms:

  • two towers
  • foursquare

At the end of this investigation, I will return to assess the project as a whole, hopefully with answers to some of the questions posed above.

I say “hopefully,” because I am also writing under constraint— reading one group of poems and writing about it, every day, and I honestly don’t know what insights the future might have in store.

Shall we explore this together?

Featured in: The “Frequency” Series