London, August 23: A Romanian website developer has created what he claims to be the longest poem in the world, by pairing up random rhyming Twitter updates.
The work currently stretches to more than 3,64,000 verses and could in theory go on forever or as long as users of the micro-blogging updates keep posting.
While many of the lines come out as garbled nonsense (“goodnight my lovely, and good luck with that!/Just hanging out with the dog and cat”), the juxtaposition of conflicting thoughts occasionally throws up some poignant rhymes.
For instance, one verse reads, “Open your heart and i’ll make you smile/give her an inch and she’ll take a mile”.
Ever pairings that seem entirely unconnected can produce unexpectedly coherent thoughts, such as: “Trust in God gives joy and peace/wake up and smell the cork grease”.
Andrei Gheorghe (22) created the programme behind the project.
The Longest Poem in the World, as he has titled it, works by pulling in updates from the public Twitter timeline and attempting to match them with tweets that the programme previously harvested.
—Agencies