Note on Nov. 8, 2005. I’m introducing two new patterns, "Villanelle", and "New Sentence". While not exactly breakthroughs in the technology of digital writing, I think they both serve to valorize and expand on the idea(s) behind my original cachet. Villanelle (from ital. villanella; villano, a peasant) is originally a medieval rustic song or dance making use of a refrain. In its standardized form, dating from the 17th century, it's a poem of 19 lines, mainly in tercets on only two rhymes, where the first and third line of the first tercet are repeated alternately as the third line of the following tercets, and then appeare together at the end of the final stanza, a quatrain. The practioners of the genre in Western tradition include Jean Passerat, Leconte de Lisle, Edmund Gosse, Oscar Wilde, W. H. Auden, and Dylan Thomas (whose famous villanelle, "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night" is reflected in my introductory example). With the term New Sentence, I am referring to a sub-tradition within the American Language Poetry movement, represented by works such as Sunset Debris and Tjanting by Ron Silliman and My Life by Lyn Hejinian. In New Sentence writing, attention shifts from the (referential level) of the narrative to the individual sentences and their (complex) relationships – it seemed to me that something similar is happening in our everyday googling, and I wanted to explore that further. However, since Google result pages tend not to contain many grammatically coherent sentences, I made the (heterodoxical) decision to try to eliminate punctuation altogether (you will see occasional periods and other curiosities - designing the parsing algorithms, though not demnding as such, is a somewhat tricky business, and I felt better to leave it at this unfinished stage). – The inner workings of this pattern involve more randomness than with the earlier ones. First, I do not use your search string as such, but expand it behind the scenes with a random, poetry-related word. Secondly, the poem is based on just one Google result page, equally chosen in random from among the first fifteen possible. That way, repeated searches with same string are likely to return quite variant results. Also, there’s an attempt to eliminate your search words, as well as the the secretly added one, from the resulting poem – something which, I hope, will create a tension between the poem and its title (along with additional blunders...). – Some initial samples of mine here.

The sonnet, deriving from 13th century Italy, consists of 14 lines divided into the eight-line sestet and six line octet. Rhyme schemes vary - the generator presently knows two variants: abba abba cde cde (from the Italian tradition) and abab bcbc cdcd ee (more common in English poetry since Spencer). The line length tries to approximate that of classical blank verse, without any attempt to follow its meter. – The rhymes (in practice, the two last letters of the line, if any) originate from the 22 first sonnets in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s suite Sonnets From the Portuguese (1850).

Couplets: poems consisting of rhyming two-line stanzas (cf. the “heroic couplets” of pre-romantic writers). The line length as well as the amount of stanzas is customisable. Here, too, the attempted rhymes come from Barrett Browning, now without attention to the frequency in the original.

Pantoum, originally Malay verse form composed in quatrains, where the second and fourth lines of each stanza reappear as first and third lines of the next stanza. - The generator varies the line length by random. The length of the poem is customisable.

Sestina is the most complex of the verse forms introduced by the troubadours (i.e. Artaud Daniel, fl. 1180). It is composed of six stanzas of six lines each, followed by a three-line envoy. All the stanzas have same end-words, but in shifting order. - The generator first composes the first stanza, then gets the material for the rest of the poem by additional searches, where the end words in turns get added to the original search string. This is why the sestina takes a while to load. For the same reason, it tends to fail more often than the other forms. It is advisable to use simple, preferably one word, search strings.

By collage we mean here a poem consisting of random cuttings from the Google return string, laid variably across the page.