burning, raving
@burningraving is a Twitter bot which tweets Dylan Thomas's Do not go gentle into that good night, one line an hour, in a continuous loop.
I've long been a fan of @howltweeter, which does the same thing for Allen Ginsberg's poem (and thanks @typograph for introducing me in the first place). I like the way that the bot drops these packets of careful, crafted language into a noisy twitter stream. I also like the way it's made me more familiar with the poem over time by making it an ambient part of my online environment.
I hope that @burningraving can do the same thing for Do not go gentle into that good night. I first read the poem years ago at school and admired it, but it didn't really stay with me (I was always more of a fan of Under Milk Wood). Later in life, as I began to think my own dad would benefit from some burning and raving himself, the poem came back to me and it's been on my mind ever since. I've been meaning to make this bot for a while, and I finally got around to it this weekend.
There's another aspect of these poetry-tweeting bots that appeals to me. In the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, spinning a wheel on which prayers have been written has a similar effect to speaking them out loud. The repetition of the words themselves is important; the means of their repetition is up for grabs. Thus, various devices have been constructed which contain the words of various prayers and mantras, either written on wheels (which are then rotated by hand, heat, wind, water or electric motor) or recorded onto tape or microchip and played on a loop (the famous Buddha Machine was inspired by these devices). In the same way, I like to think that these Twitter bots, eking out their poems line by line could do the same thing for the sentiment contained within, doing work to keep ideas alive in the world.
This bot is dedicated to my dad, and all our dads who would benefit from the turning of Thomas's prayer wheel.
Source is available on GitHub.