“Epic Lyric Poem draws from an SQL database torrent distributed to create pop lyric websites, presumably to make ad money, primarily created by fans. A Python script was used to draw out every line with the string ‘lyric’ in the database. Each of these lines was then standardized to 55 characters—the average length of a line in a pop song. The poem is 55 stanzas long, printing twenty lines per stanza. It follows the conventions of epic poetry (invocation of the muses, armaments for battle, lists, etc), with a special dedication to Alexander Pope” (Danny Snelson, “Epic Lyric Poem,” website).

From the latter’s mock-heroic narrative poem The Rape of the Lock, the first two stanzas are prefixed to Snelson’s text as an “epigraph,” not without making minor changes (“am’rous causes” becomes “poetical Causes”; the names of the characters become “LYRIC,” “Database,” and “User”) and ending with the announcement: “In tasks so bold, this little Poem engages, / And in soft Prosody, queries what this Age is.”

In Snelson’s epic lyric poem, the word “lyric” changes its position in the line again and again, as in a concordance; sometimes visual patterns result from these repetitions. As Erik Kennedy notes in his review, the extracted lines are mostly quoted from rap and hip-hop songs, a genre which uses the word “lyric” surprisingly often (Erik Kennedy, “Epic Lyric Poem”). But there are also many fragments with acknowledgments, email addresses, user comments, and HTML commands and instructions, such as “Visitors click on the link for correcting lyrics below.” Despite the algorithmic extraction and shaping of the found material, the final composition was made by hand, creating the impression of a classical epic poem.

The publication includes the printed book, the PDF file, the full SQL database and a TXT file, which can be downloaded from the publisher’s website.