Experimental Poetry 12

10/18/19

This experimental poem creates a poem where the relative size of the words is random.

To illustrate this idea, I use my Freeverse 117

Freeverse 117

the moon hung on the branches 
as a green condor flew by 
and I with my expensive binoculars 
still could not see why 

Now let's randomly alter the size of each word. To do this, I first create a low and a high value for the possible size that the font can take, and I do that for each word. Next, for each word I randomly choose a number from this range using randbetween(low,high), which I also use to pick off the direction. I use this number and direction in the HTML font tag for that word to make the size smaller or larger.

Here are two examples. The first example uses a relative size range of -5 to 5 for each word, whereas the second example gradually makes the range more positive for each word as the poem goes on.

the moon hung on the branches
as a green condor flew by
and I with my expensive binoculars
still could not see why

the moon hung on the branches
as a green condor flew by
and I with my expensive binoculars
still could not see why

Check out the random font size spreadsheet here. You are free to edit it as needed, but please credit Statisticool.com if you use this idea.

Thanks for reading.

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Please show me a randomly selected poem