John Cage was a major contributor (well, the inventor/father) of mesostic poetry. That essentially means that a letter from each line of a poem lines up with the letter of a subsequent line to form a word or phrase, like in this example at mesostic.com, that pops out of the poem on the y-axis. If I recall correctly from grad school, John Cage's For The Birds contains some real brilliance in this regard in case you're near a library soon.
Anyway, this fellow at BGSU came up with a PHP-based generator of these poems called mesostomatic. I warn you now: it doesn't do a very artistic job. And it's not an earth-shattering thing to grab content from websites for further treatment using CURL or a screen-scraping method. But it is cool, a proof of concept that the artifice can be extended and perhaps refined by following through on encoding the logic that drives the beauty of human-created mesostics. Check it out and, after you get the gist, try creating one of your own - I think Cage would be pleased! http://www.euph0r1a.net/mesostomatic/
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