Sunday, December 2, 2012

Rearranging words

After posting, on November 15, three stanzas by Darby Larson -- three of the more than six quadrillion stanzas that result from arrangements (permutations) of eighteen selected words --  I decided to try my own arranging.  Here are two results.

       noise is angry morning                          Arrangement 1
       surely hung suppose beads
       in windy eyes there's your what
       wake-up and the sway    

       in your eyes there's windy                    Arrangement 2
       what is morning angry sway
       wake-up beads hung the noise
       surely and suppose

(I put the words on small pieces of paper and arranged.  The word most difficult for me to place was "there's."  My favorite of the words is "sway."  Although my stanzas could "make better sense" if I would add punctuation in selected places, I have decided not to.)   This Text Mechanic website offers a permutation-generator for lists of up to seven words.  Here are results of applying it to the words in the first line of Arrangement 1:

     noise  is  angry  morning
     noise  is  morning  angry
     noise  angry  is  morning
     noise  angry  morning  is
     noise  morning  is  angry
     noise  morning  angry  is
     is  noise  morning  angry
     is  noise  angry  morning
     is  angry  morning  noise
     is  angry  noise  morning
     is  morning  angry  noise
     is  morning  noise  angry
     angry  noise  is  morning
     angry  noise  morning  is
     angry  is  noise  morning
     angry  is  morning  noise
     angry  morning  noise  is
     angry  morning  is  noise
     morning  noise  angry  is
     morning  noise  is  angry
     morning  is  angry  noise
     morning  is  noise  angry
     morning  angry  is  noise
     morning  angry  noise  is


My favorite of these arrangements is "angry is morning noise."  What's yours?

In the same spirit as developing new poems from permutations of words, one may develop permutations of lines.  Often the resulting poem is called a cento -- and my postings for  23 October 2011 and  30 October 2011 offer examples.  Artist Jody Zellen has developed an ipad/iphone app that generates a sort of cento called a "spine-sonnet" by selecting words from book titles in fields of art and architecture.  Information about this app and sample spine-sonnets are available here.

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