After seeing the Pointless
contestants struggle over the poetry round earlier this week, I started
thinking how sad it is that more people don't enjoy poetry -- how it seems to be marginalised and considered
either irrelevant or pretentious. I'm no
poetry expert, but I've always enjoyed wordplay and I especially love it when
things inadvertently rhyme. There's a Dr
Seuss-like neatness to it that just appeals to me.
And that's when I discovered Pentametron. It uses Twitter to "find inadvertent poetry in
the endless torrents of language that slosh around the internet". Pentametron uses algorithms to search through
up to 5 million tweets a day and find those unwittingly written in iambic
pentameter. Then it puts them together
in a collection of rhyming 'sonnets'. What a great way to bring poetry into the 21st century, social-networking spotlight -- I love it!
Follow Pentametron on Twitter @pentametron.
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