txt

A tiny cutup code poetry zine.

Each edition focuses on a different set of correspondance, usually sourced from Project Gutenberg. Poems are generated using a one-liner script and collected in a teensy zine.

The print version uses a single sheet of letter-sized paper (US), with a poster on the back. Look here for instructions for assembling the zine.

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Editions

1. De Tocqueville & Nassau
2. John Keats
3. Mary Wollstonecraft

De Tocqueville & Nassau

PDF for your screen / PDF for your printer / Source

John Keats

PDF for your screen / PDF for your printer / Source

Mary Wollstonecraft

PDF for your screen / PDF for your printer / Source

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Roll Your Own

The script

This whole project is based on a single line. This command will generate poems from whatever text is contained in corpus.txt, using $SEARCH as the query:

cat < corpus.txt | grep -e $SEARCH | cut -d ' ' -f 2-5 | tr A-Z a-z | tr -d "',._\""

Setup

First run the script to build your corpus.

$ ./bin/build_corpus.sh

You will be prompted to choose whether to include any of the available texts.

Usage

Now run the parser script and you will be prompted for a search term. Example using the search term "democracy" on the De Tocqueville text:

$ ./bin/generator.sh
democracy
lift you into aristocracy
i think that it
so irresistible a reaction
i see no symptom
rather strengthen our democracy
out which leads to
naturally not partial to
his asiatic democracy but
universal suffrage i detest

Or, to export to a file:

$ echo "democracy" | ./bin/generator.sh > txt/democracy.txt

See more examples on the txt directory, each text file is named based on the corresponding string search.

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This project was started at School for Poetic Computation.