-Excerpt taken from poetryLab's 'readme.txt':

Poetry Lab was more of an accident than an intent as it was originally intended to be a personal development tool for a poetry analyzer program I had previously created (http://pan.sourceforge.net/)

As it turned out however, Poetry Lab had far more potential than I had planed. With properly worded phrases, randomly generated texts seemed to have a rather curiously poetic flow to them.

It is my hope that this program may find itself in the hands of those who appreciate beauty in the unintentional, a curious cohesion between randomness, and intent. Enjoy!

Using Poetry Lab is simple. You can begin by using the snip-its of phrases included with the program. Once you are comfortable using Poetry Lab, have some fun with it by adding some lines of your own.

The effects are rather curious randomly phrased lines of poetry. It is difficult to explain here, but what is achieved is just that: a random poem.

For a step-by-step help guide, see below.

First thing is first, loading up Poetry Lab. After double clicking on poetryLab.jar, you will see Poetry Lab's main interface from which all controls are available to you.

Before we create a new text, it's worth noting all the functions available, what they do and how to use them.

If you would like to forego formalities and just dive in, then the first thing you may be interested in is: "File -> Create Text"

Creating any text, the parameters set before hand dicate the type of text created.

On the right hand side of the screen shot above is the list of paramters you may specify such as the style of text you desire (via snip-it types), level of emotion, and lines of text.



Snip Its are the main stay in Poetry Labs' operation, without which this program would not be possible, nor would it be possible for you to focus only on poetic lines in which you are most interested in.

If you wish to use snip-its that disregard emotional undertones, you may specify "Use User Snip-Its", otherwise, if you would like your text to carry a specific tone or emotionally specific weight, leave the check box unchecked, and specify the level of emotion desired.

Snip-Its are those single lines of poetic rythym that Poetry Lab strings together to create an unusually interesting poem or text. What types of snip-its used are up to you.

You may not be interested in emotional undertones, in which case you may only be concerned with "User Snip-Its":

Above what you are looking at is an entire text file, full of all snip its bunched together regardless of emotion.

Below you are looking at the selection menu, in which you may specify which emotional snip it section you are interested in:


That's it, that's all there is to know so create something!