i am the path along unseen heatherSnowball (also called a Chaterism): A poem in which each line is a single word, and each successive word is one letter longer. One of the constrained writing techniques utilised by the Oulipo (Workshop of Potential Literature).
o we all have heard people believe anythingGiven the mathematical genesis of the Oulipo and the interest in the movement among other programmers, I thought that someone must have created a program to generate these, and I was surprised that I couldn’t find one even after some pretty thorough Googling. So I wrote one myself. The C++ code is here.
It takes input from a text file which contains novels from Project Gutenberg, scans for word pairs where the second word is longer by one letter, and builds up a poem using Markov chains.
i am the dawn light before anybody expected something disorderlyThe poems in this post were all created by the program. They have not been edited.
i am the very great change