MFT: Poetry Threats - NSA Magnet Words Poems

Poetry Threats was a site where you could make some fancy poems out of strange and terrible and probably dangerous keywords previously courtesy of NSA. It was programmed by Tim Grover, true patriot of his country with some elaborate swagger and definitely some mousse moose style. The story goes like that: following the fallout of "that Snowden thing" Department of Homeland Security (who seemed like legit Men in Black at that point) was forced to release a list of so-called "Threat words" keywords that they were using in monitoring of social media activity. 

The said list was long and winding and unintentionally rather awkwardly poetic - not by design but because of lack of context. You need to understand the significance of the event. Giving up your set of keywords is one of the harshest things to do if you are in SEO-SMM business - it is like shooting yourself in the foot. But down is the new up - they feel much better now. And we have their old list of keywords.

Tim Grover decided to make it work the other way around. Thus Poetry Threats was brought in this pitiful world of pain and misery. Grover repurposed that dank list of threatworks and incorporated it into a site where you can turn those sad and stubborn word structures into works of hapless poetry. Why? Because why not. Harry Crosby used Wall Street reports and Tom Lehrer was singing out periodic table. Keywords are no different. The question lies in the execution.

Poetry Threats was designed as a simple magnet word table. Because that makes the whole thing even more ridiculous. The whole concept of magnet word poetry is counterintuitive and incredibly addictive. The process of making a poem is very simple. You have random generated sequence from of the list of "threat words". You can drag the ones you like to the white board. There is set of supplementary words and symbols to make the text more coherent. You can overly parts of words with one another to make some modifications of plain gibberish. Number of words is extremely limited but that isn't much of the problem. Bizarre nature of words and its combinations are making up any vocabulary limits. You can't make "nice" poem out of Poetry Threats. You can make dank monstrocity that will die moments later simply because it is not really capable of existing. Kinda like transporter accident from "Star Trek: The Motion Picture" just with words.

Here's a video demonstration of Poetry Threats in action by Tim Grover himself: 

One of the first things you realize while using Poetry Threats is that it is actually completely useless as a tool for composing poetry. There is just not enough space for plausible maneauvres. There are not enough words and you are unable to make slight changes to fit the sentences. Because of that you can only move into rather abstract and utterly inept realm where sense is usually banished just for fun. For some reason that actually manages to bring some truly apocalyptic imagery - "emergency! blizzard tsunami typhoon storm tornado outbreak", "earthquake mexico standoff", "brown out - black out - closure - burst - tremor". The more you try the funnier it gets.

I once managed to get this gem. It was actually managed to turn up in a major literary magazine:

Sadly Poetry Threats is gone and forgotten. The site is dead. But you can access fully functional archival copy of the site via Wayback Machine.