This is my first foray into electronic poetry that uses relatively large a data set, the complete Sonnets of William Shakespeare.
This project seeks to stir into a single plane all of Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets.
I used Python to prepare and properly format the poetic content for the javascript engines.
Because different poems are being stirred together–as many as 14 at once–it is impossible to preserve the ABAB rhyme scheme of the originals. This results in a (vast) collection of blank verse sonnets: 14 lines of unrhymed iambic pentameter.
There are 154 to the 14th power possible combinations in this collection. So there’s that.
The rendered screenshots will be slightly blurry. It pleases me that the rendering is clearly a degraded duplicate, more permanent but not as crisp as the ephemeral original.
Originally published at the New River: A Journal of Digital Art and Literature