The Cold Tap Sings

It looks like another humdrum tweet. But there’s poetry there: break it down into syllables (17), split them 5/7/5 over three lines, and – hey presto! – you have a haiku.

***

Totally over
This stupid weather. I hate
Being cold. So much.

***

Tweet Haikus is a project created by H₆O₆. It uses a computer program called a “natural language toolkit” in order to “pluck haiku formed tweets from the public stream.” There’s a techy article explaining how it works here but, in short, the program analyses the 400 million tweets posted each day to determine whether they might work as haikus.

I think it’s a really interesting project, and a great illustration of the pandemonium of social media: some of the haikus are disturbing, others banal, others brilliant. The program hears poetry in the noise.

@emwildcat’s haiku was originally posted here. There’s more haiku here, and you can read about Google Poetics, another online found poetry project, here.