Frequency (Modulated)
I'll begin the analysis of verse with a poem that is an outlier in the collection.
"Dance, Stars!" was not written so much as it was assembled as poetically as possible from a word frequency breakdown of the collection.
After finishing the first drafts of Tome of Stars, I did various deconstructions of the text searching for literary "tics", both known and unrecognized. Many automated tools exist to perform such work, and indeed I found I had, even in this short collection, a set of repeated phrases and words that could not be justified in their repetition solely by the needs of the poem, but which likely find their deep roots in my subconscious. It is impossible to root out all such verbal traps, but one can reduce their occurrence.
As part of this, I had one such tool generate a word and phrase frequency list, the initial word list pasted here:
dance 22, stars 22, grace 20, bright 21, cosmic 19, soul 19, spirit 18, endless 17, hearts 17, within 18, lost 18, skies 15, art 15, flame 15, upon 16, star 15, chains 14, lies 13, void 12,, sacred 12, madness 12, sweet 12, shattered 12, space 16, truth 13, pain 13, thus 11, kiss 11, song 11, joy 11, magic 11, mortal 11, beneath 12, worlds 11, divine 10, sublime 10, gods 11, shall 10, dawn 10, tears 10, wild 10, touch 10, shine 9, stellar 9, timeless 9, embrace 9, galaxies 9, kissed 9, beauty 9, sought 9, bond 9, deep 11, hope 10, spun 9, born 9, broken 9, dream 9, apart 9, prayer 8, transcendent 8, seek 8, shame 8, seas 8, spirits 8, stage 8, doom 8, embraced 8, fate 8, cruel 8, thousand 10, beyond 9, silent 9, darkness 9, glow 8, failed 8, flesh 8, break 8, chant 7, warped 7,, nights 7, sing 7, verse 7, pure 7, dread 7, fairy 7, hold 8, whispered 8, silence 8, distant 7, blind 7, dreams 7, steps 7, sight 7, sleep 7, sea 7, stargirl 11, life's 9, love's 8, heaven's 8, stargirl's 7
The phrase list was most useful for “exact reuse” sins, prompting some reconsiderations and rewrites of several sonnets. The word frequency list also prompted changes, although this was more challenging. However, as I was looking at the list, my mind started stringing the most frequent words together into phrases. Before I realized it, I was composing a poem with the absurd constraints of (1) keeping the frequency order and (2) not introducing any other nouns or verbs, but allowing myself to introduce articles, prepositions, and other elements (and at times modifying the words—changing singular to plural, etc.). I set myself the goal of producing a poem from the ordered list of words.
The end product shocked me in being not only a poem I enjoyed reading, but also one that felt like an eccentric but not inaccurate encapsulation of the collection. I then decided to include it as an Epigraph and Foreword, inaugurating the book.
Studying this poem itself (for my own meanings and word choice, etc.) is an analysis of a distilled version of Tome of Stars, the context lost in a mapping of meaning to numerical occurrence. The word choice is built into the manner in which the poem was created and reflects, in a direct but distorted manner, all the verse to come (that I do plan to analyze). To expand on why these words appear, and in the order they do, and what it means vis-à-vis the author's intent, would be to try to distill the planned poem-by-poem analysis into a single essay.
That I will not do. Instead, I'll leave it as a preview - a “teaser trailer” for what comes — as it both summarizes and also resamples to near meaninglessness what comes after, whatever my efforts to imbue a loaded word list with its own life.
Despite this critique, I repeat the procedure below to generate a new poem! "Dance, Stars!" was produced with the top third to half of the frequency list. I've now taken the second half and produced the poem "Frequency (Modulated)" in a similar manner, the title playing off (1) the fact that I used word frequency to select vocabulary and order, and "modulated" as I played around with those givens a bit to create verse, and (2) of course, FM radio, which is characterized by having information encoded in the modulation of the electromagnetic signal, as I believe — without convincing evidence — that somehow there is information about Tome of Stars that is meaningful in the constrained creations from word frequency. YMMV.
Frequency (Modulated)
Shine, timeless stellar embrace!
For the galaxies kissed beauty, sought a bond, deep,
And hope was spun, born of broken dreams—
A transcendent prayer, apart.
Seek, while shamed, those seas and spirits staged!
A doom embraced by a thousand cruel fates
Beyond the glow of silent darkness.
Yet failed flesh breaks,
Chanting warped nights
To sing verse in pure dread,
Whispered by silent, held fairies,
Distant within blind dreams.
Stargirl's steps sleep in life's sea.
My Love's sight, Heaven's.
The weaker of the two frequency poems (I think), but fun in the making.
