In a world of nifty online apps, this has to be one of the niftiest. Wordle is a word-cloud generator – those of you familiar with blogs, del.icio.us, etc. are familiar with tag clouds – this is the same idea. With Wordle, you copy and paste in a piece of text – an entire novel, a poem, a blog, a website – and Wordle generates a cloud with the most frequent words represented in larger type, less frequent words as smaller type, and a whole continuum in between. I decided to make a Wordle cloud with my poetry, taking all the poems from jacksonhays.com and entering them into the generator. Here’s what I came up with! Most of the big words make sense – “remember,” “us,” “night,” “summer,” “air,” “want,” “will,” “cold,” “city.” It seems right that “remember” and “us” are the biggest/most frequent words. But there are also words like…”hair”? Huh. Hair. Apparently hair shows up a lot in my poetry. Then you have mid-sized words like “love,” “skin,” “warm,” “wind,” “hands,” “light.” Full disclosure, I’ll admit that I removed the word “like” from the word cloud. It seems I rely on similes quite heavily, because “like” was far and away the biggest word in the cloud. Note to self: more metaphors, buddy!

Besides being a cool piece of visual art, this tells me quite a bit about my poetry. It shows what words I use the most (excluding “like,” as I said, and other words like articles and pronouns), and – more importantly – it shows me words I enjoy using but don’t use enough. Words like “smoke,” “ghost,” “neck,” “touch,” “become,” “open,” and colors. I’m inherently a visual person, so seeing my writing represented in this way turns the whole thing on its head. See? It is nifty!