When I first began this project my intent was to analyze everything we at Red Flag Poetry have ever published. However, upon further deliberation I determined that looking at everything (i.e. postcards, chapbooks, poetry express poems, and full-length collections) would be a fruitless endeavor because in each of those mediums we employ are in search of a different aesthetic. Furthermore, the overall goal for this Voyant analysis is to see how the three selecting editors for the project (Peter Faziani, Wesley McMasters, and myself) go about our collaborative selection process and if I was to look at work from before the 2016 cycle of postcards, not all three of our voices would be present in the selection of those works. Therefore, with these stipulations in mind, I first chose to analyze all of 2016’s postcard poems and all of 2017’s postcard poems that have been confirmed thus far (including the forthcoming works) in hopes of finding out something interesting about the project and maybe our editorial psyches. As you will see, I ended up adding more into this analysis later on due to to word count, but let’s see what the postcards tell us first.
The first thing that stuck out to me about this project was the actual act of preparing the texts to uploaded into Voyant. We spoke about this briefly in class, but until it actually came time for me to first of all find the poems from the past two years, and then second, trim out the excess information (i.e. author bios or information regarding the artwork on a certain postcard) I was surprised at the amount of sheer work required. My process consisted of creating separate word documents for all 23 poems, copying the text from each pdf version of the postcard, inserting this text into the word document, editing it down, and then finally saving that word document as a plain text document in order to make uploading it into Voyant easier. In general, I’m not one for repetitive tasks, so having to repeat this process 23 times was by far the least enjoyable experience about the project
When it comes to the corpus of work first being looked at here, the major thing that stood out to me was the amount of text, or total word count that Red Flag has published via the medium of the postcard over a two year period. This number seems staggeringly low at 1,271 total words
While this small word count seemed very low after all the work I put in to curating these texts for Voyant, I had to remember that the primary goal of the postcard project is to publish pithy poetry that subscribers could potentially read on their walk from the mailbox back to their home. With that frame of reference, the small number of words published on two years worth of postcards doesn’t appear that surprising. What is surprising however, is the disparity between the shortest poem we published (Poem 22 at 9 words) and the longest poem we published (Poem 3 at 152 words). What could explain this 143 word difference? If one looks at these two poems separate from the rest of the corpus it is easy to see that they are drastically different poems not just in word count, but in style as well. What is interesting though, is that both poems contain references to large cats (a lion and a panther). This may not mean anything, but it is beginning to frame a tentative hypothesis regarding the work we publish at Red Flag. Since these poems that seem drastically different both include nature imagery discussing large cats, maybe this is a consistent reference within the work published on the postcards; maybe nature imagery is something we unconsciously look for in postcard poems.
However, the cirrus cloud tool begs to differ. If we look at the original 500 word cloud, the only words referencing nature at all that appear are earth (3 times), garden (2 times), and field (2 times). These are all small occurrences just appearing in individual poems, and do not seem to speak towards the hypothesis I made. When added to the other two poems with big cat references we now have 5 out of 23 that discuss nature directly, roughly 22% of the poems, not a substantial amount.
One word in the cirrus cloud that does stick out is the word “remember,” which comes in with 5 total appearances between two poems (poem 10 and poem 11).
Still, even with it’s large appearance on the cirrus cloud, this word only appears in two poems, solidifying the need for more text to be added to this analysis.
Since it appears two years worth of postcards is definitely not enough text, I decided to add the two full-length collections Red Flag has published to the texts being dissected. As you can see below, by adding these two larger texts, the word count more than tripled from when I was looking at just the postcards. There are now 4,395 total words. This number still seems low to me considering this is essentially everything we at Red Flag have published over a two year period besides the poems we publish digitally through email and the website. Even so, a generous estimate for those poems would be the same as the two years worth of postcards, thus bringing the grand total to roughly 6,000 words published in whole over a two year span; still a small number.
One thing now can be said for certain as an overarching claim in regards to Red Flag Poetry: We publish short, pithy poetry. If you to go to Red Flag’s Website and read the about section it states, “Red Flag Poetry is drawn to pithy poetry that employ interesting and innovative language, images, or content.” As of right now the pithy part of our mission is confirmed, now let’s move on to the innovative language aspect by looking at the relative frequencies Voyant graph below.
What this tool is showing us is the frequency of appearance for a certain word within a certain poem. Basically, it is determining if a poet is being repetitive in their word choice. As we can see, there are 10 of what I will call hills, which show a word being repeated frequently within that particular poem. That’s 10 poems out of the now collection of 23 individual poems and 2 poetry collections. Therefore, roughly 2/5 or 40% of the poems contain some repetitive elements, which doesn’t necessarily bode well for the innovation involved in this project because repetitiveness in poetry is a fairly common aesthetic choice made by poets. Furthermore, if we look at Poem 11, we can see that there are three hills for just that one poem, meaning that three words repeat within that poem. These three words are are “just,” “like,” and “don’t,” which are common words one would use everyday in their speech as well as common words used in poetry for simile and metaphor. With this data, we can then determine that this particular poem is far and away the least innovative of the 25 total selections within the corpus when it comes to language choice and poetic innovation.
While this data may potentially speak negatively about the innovative use of language within the poems as a whole, the two books stand out as different data sets that should be looked at separately.
Here we’re looking at the word frequency for Book 1. What we see is that not only is there repetitiveness within individual poems quite frequently, but there is also repetition across the book as a whole. Again, this is not necessarily a bad thing within the contexts of poetry, but it is interesting nonetheless
Overall I chose to focus this project mostly on the overall summary tool and the word frequency tools within Voyant because both of these tools help to answer my overarching research question regarding if Red Flag has met it’s proposed mission to publish pithy, yet innovative poetry. With certainty the claim can be made that Red Flag indeed publishes pithy work due to the amount of total words published over a two year span. A claim in regards to the inventiveness of the poetry published is a little more difficult, however. With the data we have here I feel comfortable saying that we, the editors at Red Flag, may have to start being more conscious of innovation when selecting the poetry we publish. While repetitiveness in poetry may be used well to achieve an aesthetic goal, it does not show innovation, and for that reason I will say Red Flag has done well to meet one of its primary goals, but still needs to work on finding more innovative work. To expand on this project I think it would be interesting to compare the work we publish at Red Flag to the work published by another small poetry press to see if there are any similarities in either consistancy of the kinds of works they publish, such as we see here, or if the number of total words published also seems small.
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