poem-gen

poem-gen is a simple project for generating poems using Markov chains.

Requirements

The following programs/libraries are required to run poem-gen:

• Python 3
• Flask (optional, required for web interface)

Usage

To run poem-gen from the command line, simply run ./poem-gen.py. Enter an author and the program will print a poem.

To run the web interface, first edit config.py and set the proper the host and port you would like to run the page on. Then, run ./page.py.

Poem Files

poem-gen expects poetry to be placed in the poems folder under a subfolder indicating the author. All poems under one author folder are combined for the sake of training. Additionally, each file is expected to contain a header. The header is ignored by the processor, it is a great place to put metadata about the poem files. The header is considered everything before a blank line (a line containing nothing but a newline character). Lastly, poem-gen generates one stanza of a poem where a stanza is defined as a block of text with blank lines above and below it. Therefore, stanzas in the poem files should be broken by blank lines.

Contributing Poem Files

If you wish to contribute poem files to poem-gen, you must follow all of the above rules plus the following:

• Poems must be in the public domain in the United States
• All extra information (licence details, forwards, chapter/poem names) must be stripped from the poem files.
• There must be exactly one blank line between stanzas, and two or more blank lines between poems. This currently has no effect, but would be useful if we need to make the distinction between the two in the future.
• The header of each file must contain the author's name on the first line and the name of the collection on the second line.

Automated Poem File Cleaning

Because some poem files are large, a tool was developed to perform some automated cleaning. Many poem files online have some number of spaces before each poem while the non-poem portions have no spaces before them. If this applies to a poem file you are creating, you may wish to use tools/auto-clean.py. This script takes a poem file and the number of spaces before each poem as arguments and attempts to clean the file. The cleaned file is output through standard out. This can greatly alleviate most of the pain of creating poem files, but it is often incomplete. You will likely still need to remove parts of the outputted file before it is completely correct.