ForkWord

experiments

LOGOS

Logos is a poem of about 1.48x10⁸² lines, or about as many lines as there are protons in the observable universe. It can be browsed in convenient 2000 line chunks. I would have it printed but it seems there is not enough ink.

The concept follows from that of Jorge Luis Borges libary of babel, though instead of a library containing every possible 410 page book, this is a poem containing every possible line of 50 latin characters (plus a few special characters which allow others through html special character codes).

Logos therefore contains such classic lines as "to be or not to be, that is the question" (which occurs in Book T, Folio 108024291689 Volume 285194319490 Movement 283179717883 Canto 3280302055 Chapter 516014395490 Verse 139242951051 Line 289577548299) as well as all the classic lines that will ever or can ever be written in 50 characters or less using this alphabet.

Naturally, this poem like every other poem on this site is hereby released onto the public domain. The consequences for the future of poetry in this case are still being worked out.

Javapoems

My first javascript generated poem can be viewed here. It changes every day, moving one line down against the other to mark the passing time since the Unix Epoch. A warning however - it is infinitely long and can cause your computer to overheat or crash your browser. (most browsers display a warning message first - in which case you use this to abort the generation of the poem after the first few thousand lines). An small excerpt of the poem can be viewed here (~4,000 lines).

Of course this raises the question of whether an infinite poem can exist within a finite world. Really, the poem is only theoretically infinite - as described by the javascript that creates it with an infinite loop. The fact that there may never be a computer capable of completing an infinite loop is not a problem for a simple hack poet such as me to consider.

You can view the code that created this poem.

Continuing with the theme, a second infinite-length java poem can be viewed here, and a third here. The poem Jew York also has infinite length elements.

Absent Mare

I wrote this poem at the rate of one character a day for over two months. Although the result was not spectacular it was interesting to create.

LZ77

This poem is an experiment in using a variation of a common data compression algorithm to express repeated parts of the text numerically by referring to the original. Reading the compressed poem is interesting in itself as only the unrepeated portions are visable, the rest of the poem is a numerical code.

Since writing Lz77, I have developed a fully functioning poem compression script which you can try out on your own poems!

There are lots of hidden poems and other bits and pieces secret squirreled away on this website. That is one of the great things about the electronic vehicle of html/php and the other new media of communication (see also runme.org which showcases this sort of stuff). Writing the code for these pages (by hand using text editors) has been a lot of fun and is an intrinsic part of the creative act for me.

DOS Prompt

Not a poem but a sort of emulation of the old DOS Prompt is functioning as my 404 error page at the moment.