WordCount Poetry

My students and I have been playing with WordCount, Jonathan Harris’s slick database of the 86,000 or so most commonly used words in the English language, ranked according to frequency.

As Harris points out (playfully calling it a “conspiracy“), there are many sequences of adjacent words in the ranked list of 86,800 words that are either eerily prescient, beautiful poetry, are both.

For example, sequence 1941-1945 reads “faith establish facts requires membership” — which does in fact seem to say something about the notion of faith in today’s America.

What other found poetry awaits in the list of words?

Here are a few I discovered:

love means upon areas effect likely (words 384-389)
hate ease shadow inevitably loose (3107-3111)
langley channelled haemorrhage (14867-14869)
unfortunately noise revolution index rare (2172-2176)

And actually, come to think of it, this compilation of lines seems to have a dark undercurrent of meaning flowing through it, too.