Verbasizing a Twin Peaks scene and turning it into a poem because why not

Many months ago, I came across this video of David Bowie showing off a tool he and a friend made called the “verbasizer.” He describes it as:

“a program... It’ll take the sentence and divide it up between the columns… and then I’ll set it to randomize and it’ll take those 20 sentences and cut in between them all all the time picking out choosing different words from different columns um and from different rows of sentences. So what you end up with is a a real kaleidoscope of of meanings and topics and nouns and verbs all sort of slamming into each other.”

I proceeded to approximately recreate it as a web app (if you want to use it let me know and I’ll send you the link).

My verbasizer with a single text input box

And because I’ve been on an experimental poetry spree, I decided to experiment with some erasure-esque poems (I did a similar one here). To make this poem, I generated six lines with ten words each, and then selected removed (“erase”) some of them to generate the final poem! I’ve been rewatching twin peaks this month, so for the input text I used the transcript of Major Briggs describing his vision to his son.

Without further ado: here’s the poem itself:

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wellsprings and

a vision

a veranda in mind

carefree clear

one living

in your subsconcious

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Below is the original series of words before erasure

original lines before selection/deletion

My verbasizer recreation

David Bowie’s Verbasizer

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ily ty for reading see u soon <3