Visual Poetry

I took rich text from the book, A Clash of Kings: A Song of Ice and Fire: Book Two, of the hit series Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin. The series was so good it was converted into an HBO show. I have seen the first two seasons of this awesome show and am eagerly waiting for the third, which premieres on March 31, 2013. I used this book because the contents is very emotional and has a lot of descriptive words. Here is the portion I used: 

"The comet's tail spread across the dawn, a red slash that bled above the crags of Dragonstone like a wound in the pink and purple sky.

                The maester stood on the windswept balcony outside his chambers. It was here the ravens came, after long flight. Their droppings speckled the gargoyles that rose twelve feet tall on either side of him, a hellhound and a wyvern, two of the thousand that brooded over the walls of the ancient fortress. When first he came to Dragonstone, the army of stone grotesques had made him uneasy, but as the years passed he had grown used to them.  Now he thought of them as old friends. The three of them watched the sky together with foreboding."

I labeled each word of the rich text with their corresponding part of speech. The parts of speech I used was adjective, adverb, article, conjunction, preposition, pronoun, noun, and verb. I also added a fake part of speech called "to" for all the instances I came across the word "to" in the rich text. I believed my poem would flow better and make more sense if "to" was its own part of speech. I decided to use the lyrics from one of my favorite songs called, "I Feel Good" by Jay Electronica to create a structure of this randomized poem. This song always puts a big smile on my face even when I am not in a good mood. I chose these lyrics because I think people can relate to them. I replaced each word from these lyrics with their corresponding part of speech. Here are the lyrics I used:

"I feel good when I wake up in the morning

Yawning, crack a dawn

And I say my prayers

Thank god for makin me a super mc slayer

Brush my teeth hit the shower then I comb my hair

Step out the crib lookin dappa dappa

Hit the cipher on the corner then I smack a rapper

With a sweet sixteen

I'm so mean with this mic machine

You wanna battle me I'll battle you and shatter your dreams

I said what up, he said what up

I took you girl so what up

The crowd screamed he threw the towel man enough is enough ……

Now I'm, on my way it's a beautiful day

Sun shining on my back man what more can I pray

Rims shinin on the lak man what more can I say

Can't nobody make me angry cause I'm happy today

My little sister doin good my mama doin good and my grandmother just turned seventy three"

Here are some of the outputs I got after making the random poem generator in processing:

I put both the rich text and the lyric structure into two txt files (words.txt and grammar.txt). I imported the files as Strings into processing and split up the part of speech (the key) for words.txt with the corresponding words. I then went through my grammar.txt file, which contains the structure of my lyrics, and matched each part of speech with the key from the words.txt file. I used processing to randomly take a word from the corresponding part of speech whenever an instance of that part of speech would show up within the grammar.txt file. I used different fonts and colors for each part of speech. I added a background image of the throne from the HBO series Game of Thrones which gives it a more epic feel. One thing that could have been improved was punctuation. If there were start and end points to this poem it would make things flow a lot better. Another thing that could have limited my project was how specific the parts of speech were. I only used 9 parts of speech and since I used so few, the output might not flow as well as I hoped. I added a random number within the fill command of some words which makes them flicker. It is hard to see with these pictures so it would be best if the program actually runs.

You can download the contents of my project here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/hvro07u60iy6zeg/GameOfThrones.zip
Check it out!