Category Archives: Issue Five

#RemixReallySystem piece by Geramee Hensley

Below is Geramee Hensley’s #RemixReallySystem piece, based on this stack of fine words from ReallySystem 1-5.

 

The Island & how we pray to be known

What a sight! The cellophane plane crashed like a swoon of systems failure.

What an impatient way to fall.

This half-formed beach has corvids instead of sand. On the edge of the gulf we scoop grammar into buckets.

Somebody says “we need to obtain a name” for the rhyme and sake of it. All these waves of syntax and not a single name.

Looking, we take torches into the forest. Instead of trees, fifty-year-old memories larger than death.

In this aura of negotiable intent, we tire. Tongues fumble for words to obviate our mouths of this hot silence.

 

 

Geramee’s process note: The first word on my list was plane. I immediately thought of Lost. I went from there. I knew that I wanted to include every single word and make this as short as possible. I also used all the words in their original form. I didn’t want to do any kind of conjugation/pluralization and wanted to use the words as is. I enjoyed the challenge of trying to take this list of words and get them all into something relatively short and tight. 

Geramee Hensley’s poem November is an anagram for fishhook appeared in Issue Five.  He is from Cleveland, Ohio. He attends Capital University where has taught a portion of a creative writing class. He is the Co-Editor-in-Chief for the student literary magazine, ReCap and Managing Editor for the student newspaper, The Chimes. His work has been featured in Souvenir Lit Journal, Melancholy Hyperbole, The Harpoon Review, and is forthcoming in JAB.

#RemixReallySystem piece by Taunja Thomson

Taunja Thomson’s image-based #RemixReallySystem piece, built from these words.

Taunja Thomson - Part 1 - The Declined

Taunja Thomson - Part 2 - We Decline

Taunja Thomson - Part 3 - Bell

Taunja Thomson’s poem Skull, My Former appeared in Issue Five. Her work has appeared in The Cincinnati Poets’ Collective, The Cincinnati Poetry Review, and The Aurorean. Her poem “Seahorse and Moon” was nominated for the Pushcart Award in 2005. Several of her poems will be featured in the summer and spring editions of The Cahaba River Journal, as well as in winter issues of Squalory, Lime Hawk Journal, and Wild Age Press.

Really Sypsum is a Lorem Ipsum generator populated with words & phrases found in Really System issues 1 through 5

If you are in need of text, Really System can help. Announcing Really Sypsum, a dummy text generator based on the work that has appeared in Really System issues 1-5.

reallysyspsum

Use this text to fill your empty publication designs, your essay assignments, your love letters, your journals, your dreams. Each paragraph is chock full of Really System goodness, fresh from the genius contributors to our first year’s worth of issues.

From the the official press release:

It puckers against my graying meat, a pact. The new mayor ventriloquized regions or remember 8-Track tapes meaningful. Morse Code messages what isn’t having a harbinger of evil fool. Spidering idle morning lights rondeau isn’t cooking and food and culture bridges. Quick as a month or minute plumbing being woozy, reeling ashtray.

A cassette in a tape player which was mercury. Fire equals ouch by hip. Imagine this guys worst identified isn’t woozy, reeling century. Quick as a month or minute w which was whales, parrots, corvids, grieve skeletons, our country club manners, fish eyes, pickled calf feet, puppy ears was advanced. The Eeyore of journalists now hips. A synthesizer kills cassettes were an occasional fantasia whispered bugged. Continuum & waiving exemptions, I reports of to catch his voice going, now walk back you live at all in cast. The burning memory of mercenary alms at pretended. Would a member of beauty go to hell had is they leave a guy alone jim.

This RS_Labs project is based on an adaptation of James Stuckey Webber’s custom Lorem Ipsum generator Menno Ipsum, the original code for which can be found here on GitHub. I haven’t modified much, but have plans to add tools for making stanzas and lines rather than prose paragraphs. So, treat this like a work in progress.

Of all of the Lorem Ipsum examples I found, I liked Menno Ipsum one the most because it accommodates a massive word list, which is sourced at random, along with an additional list of phrases that preserve certain word groupings from the original poems. Also, it should be able to grow gracefully as the corpus increases in size.

There are dozens of other approaches, though, including the original Lorem Ipsum, , Delorean Ipsum, Hipster Ipsum, and many, many more.

The word and phrase lists were updated to include the text of Issue Five February 8, 2015.

,.!?-…

punctuation

Every period, comma, exclamation point, semi-colon, question mark, hyphen, and ellipsis  in Really System issues 1-5, in order, very large.

I’ve been working on some part-of-speech tagging of the corpus lately, and this is just an easy, silly byproduct of that… I realized it was easy to extract this, and even in the default html font, I love how it looks. I had already stripped quotation marks, colons, and m dashes out because of the processing I was doing, so those aren’t here.  Also, any apostrophes remain as parts of the words in which they are found with this tagger (the CLAWS tool), so those are absent as well. Looking forward to some POS stuff soon!

Epic poem slowly tweeted: “placid for song no virtue matters held”

Starting this evening, @ReallySystemBot, our little automatic friend, is tweeting out a 2,000-line epic poem entitled “placid for song no virtue matters held,” one rhyming couplet at a time for the next 2500 hours.

The poem is based on the randomized text of Really System Issues 1-5, broken into 10-syllable rhyming couplets using a modified version of Ross Goodwin’s sonnetizer_g.py python script.

I hope you enjoy this poem as it unfolds over the course of the next few months; it’s dripping with Really-System-ness, and I find it a joy to read.

Issue Five: 12 poets, 15 poems, 2,241 words

The numbers are in! 2,241 total words in the 15 poems in Really System Issue Five: My Laser Style. 1,028 of those words were unique. That’s the fewest words in any issue so far.

The most common words in the issue:  like (17), know (9), sound (7), egg (6), said (6), smaller (6).  “Like” has been in the top 10 most frequent words in 2 of the 4 previous issues.

Longest pieces: A Proper Pressurized Blast (456 words),  Encroachment on a Dry Source (302 words).

Shortest Pieces: Skull, My Former (45 words), Nature & Environmental Writing Workshop (47 words)

Highest vocabulary density (total words /  unique words): Skull, My Former (933.3), Nature & Environmental Writing Workshop (872.3)

Lowest vocabulary density (total words /  unique words): A Proper Pressurized Blast (587.7),  Encroachment on a Dry Source (609.3).