Edgar Allan Pi

I don't write that much - actually, that's completely untrue. I have hundreds of kilobytes of text files containing wibble from the last two months alone, so it's not that I don't write. And if you're wondering why so little of it gets onto bent back tulips it's that the vast, vast majority of it is unpublishable, even here. Huge, long and rambling, without point, uninteresting or written in shorthand to myself, referencing things that wouldn't have significance for anyone else. And some of it's just bizarre - have I mentioned the thousand-word essay that I wrote when I bought a new notebook, about the notebook (and in the notebook)? Oh, actually I have. I've looked at the piece of writing again, and it's still almost beyond belief.

However, I don't attempt formalised creative writing that often, even though I have a few ideas floating around. When I have played around with it in the past, though, I've found that putting constraints on the writing can produce extremely interesting results, and the end result can potentially be more satisfying than a piece which was written intuitively and freely.

So I'm really very impressed by Poe, E: Near a Raven which is a rewriting (by Mike Keith) of Edgar Allan Poe's poem The Raven with the constraint that the length of each word reflects a digit in the decimal expansion of pi. Look at the title, for a start! And the rewritten poem manages to tell exactly the same story, it rhymes and keeps a fair semblance of metre as well. He's also written a version making each line of an alt.adjective.noun.verb.verb.verb construction.

This is fantastic. I love reading stuff like this.