This is a repository to share the code for my digital poetry assignment for DGST 302 at the University of Mary Washington.
This is a Python script that takes Gutenberg's text file of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray and recreates Jack Kerouac's poem "In Vain" through the use of a template using the words from Dorian Gray. The original code can be found in a Colaboratory Notebook. I took inspiration for this type of poem from my professor, Zach Whalen's, work in his own Template Poetry example he provided for us in class.
I chose Kerouac's poem as the template for this project because he is one of my favorite poets and authors from the Beat Generation and because I love his style of writing. I chose The Picture of Dorian Gray as the text being integrated into this poem because it was one of my favorite books I have read (that is also out of copyright) and thought the text would fit with the theme of Kerouac's original poem.
I created this poem with the intention of doing something similar to Alison Knowles's "The House of Dust" (here is an examples by Nick Montfort) which is one of the earliest examples of computerized poetry. However, I did not want to simply recreate her project, leading me to find a poem that spoke to me to use as a template. Jack Kerouac's work has had a special place in my heart since reading the intoduction he wrote in Robert Frank's The Americans (1958) and I wanted to include "In Vain" since it is a fairly historical poem, and I am a person who really enjoys history.
For this repository I have included my Python code, as well as a link to my original Colab Notebook I created it in. Since the notebook calls for the text file of The Picture of Dorian Gray to be run in the program, I have also uploaded the edited version I used, though it came directly from Project Gutenberg.