ARTIST’S IMPRESSION
Ranjit Bhatnagar, 47, an artist and musician based in New York, found poetry on the Internet, specifically on Twitter. By creating an algorithm that could source tweets across the microblogging site, he founded Pentametron, which houses rhyming tweets put together as poems. The poems are in iambic pentameter, a commonly used rhythm for poems, particularly in Shakespeare’s plays. The website, with the tagline “With algorithms subtle and discrete, I seek iambic writings to re- tweet”, is updated with different 14- line poems everyday. While the poems can’t rival the works of Tennyson, Milton and Frost, sometimes it is hard to believe that the poems were conjured through a computer programme. They are whimsical, funny and un- knowingly profound.
Sample an excerpt from a poem that emerged on Labour Day—“I absolutely hate the letter K; no work tomorrow! Happy Labour Day! :); I’ve never met a bigger hypocrite; Don’t criticise the present..... live in it.”