I have for a long time now been working on and off on a poetry project involving prison letters and prison dating. The project goes by the working title of He said she said (inside) and bundles together a large number of my poetic and non-poetic interests/obsessions: found poems, crowd-sourced writing, acrostic poetry, randomness, statistics, lists, internet search engines, corpus linguistics, discourse analysis of the use of little words (prepositions, pronouns and the like), ambiguity, the interface between art and science, gender differences, social inclusion of underprivileged voices, voluntary or involuntary confinement/’encavernment’ and the illusory constitution and projection of the self through language.

In response to today’s Finding Everyday Inspiration task https://dailypost.wordpress.com/blogging-university/writing-everyday-inspiration/ on the subject of letters I am, for the first time, publishing some preliminary results of this ongoing creative writing research project.

As befits a project that is as much social science as art, I must first outline the methodology used to produce these ‘poems’.

Twenty letters were selected at random from a corpus gathered from prison inmate dating sites, ten written by male inmates, ten by females. Word frequency calculation software was used to arrange the words used in the letters, divided up into male and female groups, in order of frequency. Words were included in the final poems/results tables if they occurred with an overall frequency of ≥ 5 (i.e. 0.5 occurrences per letter), calculating separately for each group.

Crude intuitive cluster analysis was used to arrange the words by descending order of frequency into groups that make up the lines of the two poems (one for the males, one for the females). The poems are formatted in such a way that the font size of each line is proportionate to the frequency of the words it includes. (I was not able to reproduce this effect in this blog post.)

No attempt is made to massage or manipulate the resulting text so as to make it more grammatically or metrically acceptable. I find the resulting ‘poems’ eerily revealing and am thrilled by the idea that my authorship of them is at best minimal. These poems and this project belong to all incarcerated people around the world who take the trouble to put pen to paper.

While writing this post, I decided to rename the project Habeas Corpus.

 

She said (inside)

I

and to a

my with am for

you have

the love be

of me

very

new like is in enjoy

would that open know can

who what person but

things someone people out or learning if good

 

He said (inside)

I

to and

a

you am

the is

me of my in that

do

have

if with can

who

for not about it

this only be

would or friendship are

so like life know all

love little from at

your write will we very real on never looking great get

time take some share out one myself make God friends friend because