Encomials: Sonnets from Pentametron,
Ranjit Bhatnagar

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“Ranjit transcends rather than translates content, operating on a level where he freely moulds language as pure abstracts beyond and away from the confines of the medium.”  —Vicki Bennett

“Ranjit Bhatnagar brings to life what Paul Klee might have called a ‘twittering machine’— a device that, in this case, collates sonnets from a chorus of online tweets. Each sonnet reveals the inadvertent pentameters of poetry, hidden in our daily, banal speech. Such a whimsical anthology reveals that, unlike the poets of today, our machines are only getting smarter. Each tweet enlivens us with its haphazard surprises, while all the algorithms race by us, sprinting up Parnassus.” —Christian Bök

While attempting to make a musical instrument based on spoken English, Ranjit Bhatnagar realized he could use the computer to find poetic forms in written texts. The result was Pentametron, a program that finds iambic pentameter in Twitter’s endless linguistic torrent and collects it in rhymed couplets. Encomials: Sonnets from Pentametron consists entirely of these tweets, automatically assembled into sonnets. Bhatnagar chose his favorite sonnets from hundreds that were generated, adding punctuation according to his own whims. Each chapter of the book conforms to a different formal constraint exemplified by its title.