I always get a special joy from seeing things like this. This is something I would never have thought of. It fills such an obvious hole in hindsight. It opens up a place where folk can suddenly experiment and play with something that they might have been afraid of previously. It opens things up.
This reminds me of when I helped out with some teacher training in my teens waaaaay back in 1986/87. We were showing some primary school teachers and primary school kids their first computers. Some simple paint programs. Some simple word processors. This is a mouse. Etc.
I remember this one eight or nine year old loving the delete key in the word processor "I can make the mistakes go away" he said.
We left some of the kids messing about with the machines as we talked to the teachers. 30m later that kid came back to drag us over to see this couple of hundred word story that he'd tapped out. The teacher said that, if she hadn't seen it herself, she wouldn't have believed the kid could have produced it. Grammar, spelling, plot, etc. were worlds above his normal standard.
Because he could make the mistakes go away.
The look on that lads face as he took that story away with him (we printed it out for him) still brings tears to the eye of this cynical old bastard.
I've always bit really terrible at poetry. I played with this for 30m.
Anecdotes like yours are one of the main reasons I read HN. Thanks for sharing.
Now back to the subject of the thread, kudos to the author. Every time I try conveying an idea into a poem I get stuck on the sounds of the words; it's rather hard to me to find the right rhymes, especially since English is not my native language and I'm used to read far more than to listen to it.
And back to another side note, I stumbled upon this writing by Joe Davis called Telescopic Text [1] a few years ago, and loved it. He also built a tool [2] to aid writing texts on the same format and, though I never managed to finish a text myself, I found the tool rather amusing too.
Anecdotes like yours are one of the main reasons I read HN. Thanks for sharing.
Y'welcome. Have another from the same session of teacher training. It's one I trot out while wearing my UX hat when folk talk about 'intuitive' interfaces.
This was late eighties remember. In the UK too. Mice were not common. Almost everybody we put down in front of one had problems initially. This was often the first time these folk had been in front of a computer - let alone one with a mouse.
In one case I had to take the mouse apart (look here's this ball - it moves against these rollers - they send the x/y changes to the computer, that moves the little arrow on the screen) before the teacher 'got it'.
If you like this kind of anecdotes, you should read "Mindstorms" by Seymour Papert. It's more about maths than writing, but it's filled with examples showing how the fact that computers allow children to make mistakes, and then fix them, changes deeply the way to teach.
What is this I see?
This I don't understand.
Near matches, you say?
I am at your command.
But the matches don't match!
The rhymes, they are off!
What am I to do?
My brain is too soft.
Yet now I move boldly
Into a new verse
The fucking matches don't work.
Fuck this bullshit.
I could try to understand.
Study like I'm in school.
The numbers on the left.
They seem kind of cool.
But my attention can't hold.
The wide internet looms.
If I am your target,
your product is doomed.
Let me start of by saying thank you!
Your feedback is great at any rate
The near matches are there to guide you through
Tough words you may face that leave you stuck at the gate
But alas near matches help give you a clue
To help keep your poem straight
This tool is still yet a hack and much too new
Have a bit of hope and we will help you create
Great poetry for all to view
I don't believe we are doomed in fate
The poem you created was amazing and true
I see it as a victory that you found time to try and operate
So please let us try to make your experience less blue
By letting us know what we can improve to ease your current state
I do think it's nice
I poke and I jest
This mu'fuckin thingy
It's really the best
Despite the bad rhymes
Showing up on the right
I think this here app
Is tighter than tight
Do you not see wrong words?
Showing up over there?
Right now it says "bright"
Which we both know ain't right
My poem til here
Was like ABCB?
A failure perhaps
To detect that rhyme scheme?
I'm not a poet
I think you can tell
I'm just like a kid
Just ringing a bell
So what do I know?
Maybe it's right.
I'll stop here for now
And bid you goodnight.
Edit: Ooohhhh, I'm supposed to enter the Rhyme Scheme manually. I assumed it was supposed to be automatically inferred from the poem. It wasn't obvious to me that the rhyme scheme is an input field.
I'm not sure you're not a poet. This one and your earlier one have a certain something that is definitely more than what is being added by the tool (compare them with the response by demodesigns, yours are simply better poetry).
I particularly like
Right now it says "bright"
Which we both know ain't right"
Because of course as soon as you used it it became right.
By the way, the numbers on the left are the syllable count. Pretty useful if you're doing a limerick or haiku.
If you're looking for suggestions: If you really want people to use this as a writing tool, make the interface itself more tranquil - the "Tranquillity" title is distracting, and the poem title typeface is awful. Not everyone who writes poetry is into that kind of frilly aesthetic. Find a few well-designed poetry books to use as design examples. A full-screen mode would be easy to implement and super useful.
Similarly, the rhyming tools are interesting, but make them hideable for anyone who is not using them. I would use a thesaurus a thousand times more often than a rhyming dictionary.
I actually like the fixed-width font but suspect many wouldn't. Maybe an option to switch between fixed-width and not. Also, I expect to be able to use the tab key to indent, but it doesn't work here.
This is really interesting, and a beautiful little project.
Unfortunately, I don't think it will be of any use to actual poets... Rhyming isn't really in style for modern poetry, and what there is is usually more subtle internal rhymes rather than heavy end-rhymes.
Still, this is a ton of fun to write doggrel with.
Perhaps your observation indicates a defect of "modern" poetry, a defect that a project such as this might help remedy. I'd wager that Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare would be surprised to learn that non-rhyming poetry was ever "in style"—though I suppose dactylic hexameter, terza rima, and sonnets are a bit end-rhyme-heavy.
Considering Shakespeare wrote mostly blank verse (unrhymed) and Homer wrote unrhymed dactylic hexameter... I'd take that wager.
Greek and Latin poetry is actually almost never end-rhymed... because Greek and Latin are heavily inflected with lots of conjugations and declensions, the "endings" of words are often the same and a bit too obvious.
Rhyming poetry actually came into style for a couple centuries in English poetry... it's by no means a universal feature of poetry.
Edit: Also, I guarantee that "finding a rhyme" is not the bottleneck that's keeping modern poets from writing rhyming poetry.
A poem, or a program or mathematical prove could be written down only after it has been emerged, formed to some extent, in one's mind.
When people sat town to write something but having no idea that was thought over for a long time (consciously and as background processes) with hope that an IDE will help them quickly put together a program, or a poem, they will end up with a mediocre piece of a crap.
It is true for almost every kind of writing, including letters or blog-posts. Matlab alone cannot help you prove anything.
Being a poet (or programmer) is a habit of the mind. A rhythm is not a problem, the meaning is.
It doesn't promise to make a poet out of you, it's just a toy. You know, for fun.
People don't start anything correctly; babies don't start life running marathons or breezing through piano suites, we learn through play and toys are the tools of play. This is a toy for poetry, remarkably beautiful in its simplicity and the way in which it invites one to play.
Personally, I find that pieces of writing come out in little shreds over time; I was hoping this would be something that would assist in the process of recording and putting them together, or maybe some sort of nonlinear text editor that lets you have multiple alternate phrasings for a line. But no, I guess I'll still have to write it myself.
I disagree with this, but am fascinated by the idea of what you're saying.
When I write (code) , I don't do so with an idea of what I'm going to say down to the word (module), but I do have a vague idea of what I want to say (do). This paragraph, for example; I knew I disagreed with you, but I had to write it out to explore why. If I'm trying to conform to some arbitrary rhyming scheme (syntax), I'm going to be faster in my writing if I can see what all of my options are.
nice! it even provoked me to spend some time writing this something instead of going to bed (sorry for the rant, i'm a bad bad sleep-deprived poet:)
i think duck typing is retarded.
although sometimes it is regarded
as an elegant solution
to your code base evolution
don't let simplicity of use
and the surrounding hype confuse
your inner paranoid coder
who wants to keep the code in order.
don't let your laziness corrupt
your bits and bytes and interrupt
execution of your program.
type annotations do no harm,
but add perfection to the scene.
without'em source code looks obscene.
so don't be shy to add some strictness,
let the compiler check the fitness
of your fondly written code.
and to conclude this episode
i'd like to say it to the masses:
let compilers save your asses!
I'm sure you've thought of it, but one could actually get this to do scansion too -- the CMU dictionary here http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/cgi-bin/cmudict has stress and syllable breakdowns.
I've tried to use CMUdict for computational poetry... it turns out to be more difficult than it seems at first because stress is context-dependant (especially with monosyllables).
Alternate rhyming dictionaries is actually a really interesting problem, as different cultures have different ideas of what the ideal rhyme is.
In English, words where the onset consonant is the same (e.g. 'tend' and 'attend') are considered relatively poor rhymes, whereas in French they're considered to be "rich". In Portugese, even the part of speech is taken into account: a rhyme between a noun and a verb is considered a better rhyme, say, than two nouns that rhyme.
This is obviously a solved problems (I mean, you can buy rhyming dictionaries in France or Portugal), but I wonder if it would have any interesting ramifications on the design of the feature.
I hate to be a naysayer but I'm not sure how helpful this would be to your average poet. Things like rhyme and meter counts are rarely involved in early drafts of poems. If you're shooting for a certain style or form typically you keep that in mind as you produce but I'd wager the vast majority of work being produced today doesn't follow any major scheme.
This seems like a tool made for poets without the input of poets based on a skewed idea of what a poet needs.
EDIT: I've been writing poetry for about 4 years and have taken 5+ university poetry classes. I'm by no means a "poet" or in anyway an expert on poetry but to me, I'm not sure I understand the strength in this.
First, when I'm looking for something to write in I absolutely want a minimalist interface. Anything more than that is an immediate distraction. I use iA Writer on a Macbook Air or on an iPad. I've heard combinations like this described as "typewriter" like in their single-task orientation.
This app has too many distractions. While writing the last thing I would want to break my flow is a barrage of information about bits and pieces of my work that, for the most part, aren't relevant. I do not write with any sort of meter or rhyme in mind (rhyming as a crutch is an amateur device and the biggest red flag of someone with an incomplete knowledge of poetry) but after critiques from peers and layers of revisions sometimes these elements do come out and get accentuated in my work.
In the ballpark of features I would like? Collaboration! Workshopping poems is by far the most satisfying and useful way to improve your poetry. Find ways to share documents with multiple people, get feedback and respond to it. Things like Google Docs/Drive have barriers of entry that if you can remove would make this app excellent for sharing with peers who aren't local.
Right now I use a combination of Google Drive, iCloud and email to share my work, keep track of revisions and send out requests. Its probably the most major hurdle in my workflow and something begging to be addressed for writers.
> Find ways to share documents with multiple people, get feedback and respond to it. Things like Google Docs/Drive have barriers of entry that if you can remove would make this app excellent for sharing with peers who aren't local.
This idea was an actual project I started building at one time, but from all the people I know it didn't seem to solve their problems. Unaware of the potential user base I left it stagnant for a long time. Maybe knowing that indeed there are others with the same idea, I should hop back on that and do a MVP to test it out.
About this tool as a helper, it is adequate in fact to the term IDE. For all you say in your comment about concentrating on the subject first, is the same mentally I shift to when coding by using vim, instead of an IDE (which I use mostly at work only).
I quite like your poetry IDE
But it doesn't count acronyms properly
Or syllables, "poetry" has three not two
But small complaints aside, bugs are quite few!
This is neat. I was skeptical about the rhyme matching feature, but I ended up using one of its suggestions.
When lines wrap, they stop lining up with the syllable counts. It would also be nice if the continued lines were indented, but I'm not sure if that's possible with CSS2.
It thinks "false" is two syllables, which seems to be just a dictionary problem. For something like this, those need to be very diligently squashed if you plan to make something commercial out of it.
The editor is way too small - this is a really simple fix.
Finally, I'm not sure why this is all in PHP - it seems like this would be much easier to use self-hosted or otherwise packaged if it was client-side only PHP and Javascript. It doesn't look like the program does anything which couldn't be done that way trivially - please correct me if I'm wrong.
In other respects, this is pretty basic, but very well-done, particularly for a hackathon project. Nicely done!
1.) Yeah, there're still some bugs that we need to work out. We also need to come up with a more scalable solution of finding rhymes if we go commercial.
2.) Yeah, you're right. We just wanted something that would look good on the projector during our demo. This needs to be tweaked.
3.) You're right for the most part. We didn't really know how we'd be implementing it at the beginning. We thought we'd need to do a lot of heavy server-side processing (which turned out to be a false assumption). We do want to add the ability for users to exist and have poems saved under their account that they can share and stuff though.
4.) Thanks! We decided early on that it'd be better to do a few things well than try to implement a lot of half finished features.
I noticed some metric irregularities when Tranquility was supplied with the masterwork entitled, "The Fortitudes of Ancient Testiclies" (an obscure Greco-Roman poet), written by the equally obscure Roman poet Platitudinus.
10 For strength I turn to ancient Testiclies!
10 Few cantos of his Gonadology
7 survive: he influenced Hippocrates!
10 Dualities, another work, contrasts
10 constipation with gastroenteritis.
9 What would the Poet Testiclies have said?
10 Science must be pursued for its own sake
9 And never to impress potential mates!
Hmm; the one line that doesn't have 10 syllables (constipation..) shows as having 10, and it likely doesn't have a way to show the ones where the stresses don't line up right.
Though to be fair, this is a tricky problem, especially if people throw in invented words and names. This is one of those things that's probably far easier to solve in your head after a bit of practice than programmatically!
A while ago, I came across a test posted here on HN by a researcher at Duke.
He was trying to determine if entrepreneurs are more inclined to take risks than other types of people, as part of an ongoing experiment designed to elicit "what it is" that makes entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs.
Some time after that, in a moment where, I've got to admit, I felt pretty defeated by the difficulties my friends and I were encountering in our startup, I ended up writing a poem.
Not sure how or why it happened, since the words seemed to just 'appear' as if out of thin air, but the end result is something that speaks a great deal - to me at least - about the "whatness" of entrepreneurs.
It takes passion to create something that lives outside yourself, and courage too. The same two qualities which the ancient Greek poets prized above all others in their works.
Makes me wonder if modern-day founders would've been poets in earlier times lol.
Good luck with your project!
--The Bouldrèd Night--
The bouldrèd cliff jutting faintly upon far-off lands a' horizon's light
Shows but a whisper of might, but 'ere the closing day foreshadows
Defiance borne roughly upon the humble spot of soul and bras.
What power's this come thundrèd forth from falling skies?
Keen eyes all watch, yet but few allow the self to see and tell.
Many lights, born free, bear out their sights in visions
Birthed of other men's ambitions - with scarce looks not in
Augury of pomp and silver for their avariced jailer's
Searching leap upon the newly-minted throne, gilt of old.
How strange is this? That we should bear ourselves
Towards despair, and walk, 'ere the gallows,
Hooded, our shackled soul wound round the neck in dreams,
False-true, abandoned free of vice for Clarity's comforted
Embrace of those acquainted, once met, never cared.
Look at all these hackers,
Using an app, rhyming their prosaic chapters.
Are they gone? The times when love and loss,
Inspired mankind, towards poems and songs?
Quit bitchin' & give it a spin,
You silently curse,
Didn't you see? I already joined; this fucking circus.
I did it!
Did I?
No, it seems
This index is a disease
Why this explain query want me to die?
Oh, I can see now... I won't cry
I will try
Mongodb Covered Index to fly
But I can't lie
It has to scan my collection hard
better a compound one, the docs reply
my expectations were too high
It went and went
Like a sent Pequot;
For at wit's end
Lied St. Bernard;
Clothe me master
Welcome the foe
To them that desire
To supper at the broth;
Oh majesty, the flock,
The dismembered joint,
What captured Lemeaux!
- Dean Rykicz 1903
I also made a Text Statistics javascript class based off of Mr. Child's! Any plans on putting your version on GitHub - I'd love to star it and use it to improve the version below.
I thought I'd continue my work
But HN gets in my way
And now I found another toy
To replace my work with play
Damn you HN, what have you done?
Always getting in my way
Someday I'll get you back and more
Then you will feel dismay
I've got people in the Delaware D.O.C.
I send 'em 89 bucks, they send me equity!
Collaborate or compete, 'til HN's header goes sable
I'll put a cap in your ass
or put your ass in a cap table.
Very nice. I noticed an irregularity in the dictionary though – for some reason "farewell" is seen as having 3 syllables when it only has 2. (At least the way I pronounce it...)
I had fun with it. This work-in-progress poem came off a little too depressing though. :)
hello world, I'll finally display
Those conditions that I might live one day
and given my arguments local and global
I cannot say where to be is my focal
so sure of my halt but not the end of my efforts
overflowing with input or gridlocked in semaphore?
Great job, doesn't work in Opera! And what's more, it fails silently so I just spent 5 minutes wasting my time to see when this app would start different from a plain text area in a bright minimalist layout (that doesn't tell anything about the functionality one is supposed to expect), it wasn't until I read the discussion here that I fired up Chrome.
I peddle down the street,
With a subtle tremble at my feet,
Gazing at what's ahead,
My mind tired and eyes red,
I want to pull away,
But must push for today,
Before eyes weave shut,
And trails leave no trace.
All night we hack,
And sleep we lack.
We eat junk food,
The code is crude.
Nevertheless,
Friends are impressed,
When in the morning,
Our post on HN* is roaring!
The syllable count fails on some words. For example "naïve". If you can't trust the program to count syllables at least as reliably as the writer using it, what use is it?
Ironically, the diaeresis which it probably ignored is essentially an indication that the two adjacent vowels do not form a digraph and hence form parts of two syllables. (Admittedly, umlauts and diaereses are represented by the same characters on a computer, but their placement with respect to other vowels gives them away most of the time.)
Delete not this post for fear of shame
for written here is the poster's name
And when he's dead his ghost will come and say
Why did you delete my post anyway?
This is cool. I didn't see anyone else asking for spell check, so may I be the first? Also, some sort of completion would be nice - maybe have tab complete the top word?
This is great. Thanks for posting it. I had some trouble with the syllable counts, but this is really useful for, well, quickly writing rhyming poetry. Good work.
Just a note: Make the placeholder look like a placeholder, I was ready to submit a bug because I tought it as real text and I was trying to select and delete it.
for ages I've been pondering
if there's a word named yombering
untilix dawned on me
that flimbonapermee
whatever smolteroo
has clept axontheru
nex clamper withapod
troliqui glorkisquad.
i think you'd have a pretty great mobile app on your hands here if you added a social/sharing side. A timeline of top poems. Instagram for poetry pretty much.
This is something we didn't get to at the hackathon. I agree that this is a feature that needs to be there. We plan on implementing a user system where people can save their poems and choose whether they're private or public. We don't really want to add more features than necessary though. Less is more and whatnot.
Thanks! That's sound advice. We don't plan on adding more features than necessary. A user system with sharing and persistence of poems should be sufficient.
I always get a special joy from seeing things like this. This is something I would never have thought of. It fills such an obvious hole in hindsight. It opens up a place where folk can suddenly experiment and play with something that they might have been afraid of previously. It opens things up.
This reminds me of when I helped out with some teacher training in my teens waaaaay back in 1986/87. We were showing some primary school teachers and primary school kids their first computers. Some simple paint programs. Some simple word processors. This is a mouse. Etc.
I remember this one eight or nine year old loving the delete key in the word processor "I can make the mistakes go away" he said.
We left some of the kids messing about with the machines as we talked to the teachers. 30m later that kid came back to drag us over to see this couple of hundred word story that he'd tapped out. The teacher said that, if she hadn't seen it herself, she wouldn't have believed the kid could have produced it. Grammar, spelling, plot, etc. were worlds above his normal standard.
Because he could make the mistakes go away.
The look on that lads face as he took that story away with him (we printed it out for him) still brings tears to the eye of this cynical old bastard.
I've always bit really terrible at poetry. I played with this for 30m.
Bravo.