Digital found poem is a free random poetry generator that tosses tens of thousands of snippets of language (words, phrases, clauses) into the air, then drops them programmatically onto your computer screen into millions of combinations of poem-like text.
This text isn't always pretty—or logical—but it's very readable, and with a little work, some of it could be shaped and molded into acceptable found poems. As such, teachers teaching introductory poetry-writing classes or workshops might want to use digital found poem as a warm-up exercise for their students. For beginners, thirty minutes of playing with words provided may be a more enjoyable and productive way to start each writing day than to have to stare at that proverbial blank page and hoping that somehow the words will come. And being able to recognize which lines in random text have poetic possibility and which do not is also not a small part of learning to become a better poet.
If you’re not a teacher but someone interested in how a computer can be used to randomly bring together carefully chosen words, phrases, and clauses in an attempt to create bits of aleatorypoetry, see below to download digital found poem.
The user interface (UI) of digital found poem looks as follows. Click the generate new poetic text button and you'll get completely new text to play with.
Digital found poem is an extremely simple, single-file text editor that won't add cookies, mess with your registry, or collect any personal information. If you download it and it's not to your liking, you can delete it with a single click.
Note: Digital found poem is programmed for Windows PCs/tablets only and it won't work on mobile phones. And it will only work on a Mac and other operating systems if they can run Windows.
Note: Although digital found poem doesn't contain "four-letter" words, it's intended for a mature audience. Its dark and adult themes make it inappropriate for those too young for that.
To see digital found poem in action, download it by clicking download digital found poem (Updated January 12, 2020). For download instructions, see the download info page.
