Day: February 3, 2020

distribution of words

The Tower – v2

the-tower

I am starting to write some tools to examine a draft of the tower.  That photo is an example of the  frequency distribution of words.  What does that picture look like for different poems? Good question.

Here are some common words in v2 of the tower.  N.B. I had to turn all the words into lower case to make this work. [(‘the’, 261), (‘i’, 221), (‘and’, 203), (‘a’, 142), (‘my’, 130), (‘to’, 124), (‘of’, 101), (‘her’, 100), (‘you’, 87), (‘in’, 85), (‘me’, 76), (‘is’, 75), (‘she’, 62), (‘your’, 56), (‘it’, 54), (‘?’, 54), (‘not’, 45), (‘what’, 43), (‘love’, 38), (‘with’, 37), (‘on’, 36), (‘we’, 35), (‘but’, 34), (‘are’, 32), (‘for’, 32), (‘that’, 32), (‘have’, 31), (‘or’, 29)]

Here are some uncommon words – ‘nice’: 1, ‘lore’: 1, ‘echos’: 1, ‘chorus’: 1, ‘chora’: 1, ‘corpus’: 1, ‘complement’: 1, ‘polyphonic’: 1, ‘syncopation’: 1, ‘melodic’: 1, ‘measure’: 1, ‘joined’: 1, ‘gregorian’: 1, ‘chat’: 1, ‘created’: 1, ‘chippewas’: 1, ‘yume’: 1, ‘indian’: 1, ‘warberler’: 1, ‘warbler’: 1, ‘skeleton’: 1, ‘scrum’: 1}

There are 1165 words used once. there are 1772 distinct words there are 5860 words total. Some of these uncommon words are banal (nice), most of the frequent words are copulas. I may run some other poems of similar length through this and see what pops up.

This stuff is pretty basic – but thought provoking and useful in editing. I am going to go through now and perhaps delete many if not all the most common words. I am going to look at the least common words and think about what sort of world they build. It is what I want.

I am thinking my next code jig will involve meter and rhythm.

I have posted the code on  https://github.com/msrobot0/.

https://poets.org/poem/dawns-awake

The Dawn’s Awake! – Otto Leland Bohanan

Uncategorized

I read the first few lines of this poem (thanks poem-a-day) the other day and immediately wanted to read more and learn about the poet. I have no idea why. Well, I have an idea why. I was drawn to the bombastic imagery.

Bombastic could be considered pejorative, but I consider it positive. Most poetry today is quiet. Finding the quiet things, the invisible things that people over look and making those things loud. Rather than making the things already loud majestic. And I totally agree with that. Many things that are loud today are NOT majestic and should NOT be celebrated. But it is warms my heart when there are big things that are majestic and they are celebrated. Like the f*ing dawn!

I take my kids to the bus in the morning and walk Otto the dog. One of the great things about this is that I get to see the dawn. It reminds me of City of Angels  – the remake of wings of desire – where Angels hear music in the dawn.  My senses are just touched by this poem “Whispers of pent-up harmonies”, “mingled fragrance of the trees”, “A flash of smoldering flame and fire”.

Who was Otto Leland Bohanan? From poets.org:

Otto Leland Bohanan was born around 1895 in Washington, D.C. He graduated from Howard University and taught English at the Catholic University. He also worked as a music instructor at DeWitt Clinton High School, and died in 1932.