I have glutted
the toughs
that were in
the fracas

and which
you were probably
crooning
for fungus

Grapple me
they were jocular
so shag
and so staunch

Our Mad Lib Engine exercise taught me several things about language structure and poetic content.

By deforming Williams’s “This is Just to Say,” I gained a greater appreciation for the structure of the English language, how objects work with actions and intentions to convey a performance. (It has always been my believe that all language is performance.) In the case of Williams’s poem, I gained a greater appreciation for the way simple sentences can convey subtle meaning. In the last stanza, the speaker offers an apology that, in retrospect, seems halfhearted because of the word, “so” (11, 12), and the vividness and appropriateness of the adjectives, “delicious” (10), “cold” (11) and “sweet” (12). The speaker’s language is very indulgent despite his apparent apology. In my deformed poem above, the apology disappears and “jocular” (10), “shag” (11) and “staunch” (12) create a silly quasi-alliterative juxtaposition. My poem is interesting in a totally different way than Williams’s original as a result of the simple replacement of a few words.

By replacing key words throughout the poem, I also gained an appreciation of the vastness of the English language. It’s difficult imagine the number of word combinations available to a poet. Our language can do so much, and I think the Mad Lib Engine makes that readily apparent. A poet can jiggle and juggle the unlimited range of words to create endless variations and communicate exactly what he or she intends. This idea of “content possibility” is invigorating for me. Also, the deformed poems were often super-funny, and they reminded me not to be so serious all the time!

By performing this “deformance,” I also appreciated the tool’s potential for deconstructing poems that have become so ubiquitous. When a poem, like “This is Just to Say,” is repeated and reprinted so much, it becomes canon, and we then forget to question its quality. Its greatness becomes a given. But, the Mad Libs Engine helps remind me that a poem is just words, creatively organized. As a poet, it grants me a freedom that I might not have realized and makes the great poems of the past less intimidating. I would like to play with other canonical poems using the engine.