Forever Gwen Brooks started as a Python project that was ported to JavaScript for the web. The project began by making a template out of her poem “An Aspect of Love, Alive in the Ice and Fire” from her 1969 book RIOT. The program replaces, at random, parts of speech (adjectives, nouns, pronouns) that are variables in the program, while other elements are constants.

The parts of speech are drawn from the rest of the poems in RIOT (give or take a neologism or two), with the intended effect being that RIOT, the book, is cycled through the book’s final poem.

The final poem takes advantage of Brooks’ signature styles and amplifies them, creating an endless and immortal poem by Gwendolyn Brooks that can, in a sense, live forever. It provides new and dynamic ways of experiencing the poem and the book, with no single iteration being definitive or repeated. Any given instance of the generated poem by Brooks may never appear again (it’s highly unlikely.)

In this way the project is both eternal and ephemeral, and is intended as an homage to Gwendolyn Brooks, one of the greatest writers of our time.


Created by Lillian-Yvonne Bertram