The first time we did deformation with the twitter bots, I thought that it was kind of entertaining, but I didn’t think that it was really beneficial to understanding the meaning of the poems. I also don’t think that it would have been as entertaining to people who like poems less.
When we did the programming to make it generate new words on our own, it was cool to see how much effort went into deciding which words would change and  figuring out how to do it without breaking the poem. I think that if there was a way to make the computer look for synonyms instead of random words, it would be a better tool for understanding the original poems, and the words that were chosen for them. For example, in the red wheelbarrow,  there are a lot of words that mean white, especially in terms of poultry, but the author chose white. Why did he choose white instead of one of the other words, such as light, pale, or colorless? What happens to the poem is the wheel barrow is sitting next to pale chickens, rather than white.
I think that changing the word, in this example, helps to highlight the improbability of white chickens in a wet world. White chickens suggests a more pristine, clean, chicken, whereas pale would still suggest that they have white feathers, but doesn’t have to mean they’re clean. Their cleanliness suggests the farm isn’t abandoned. Random other adjectives like “young” which could come up in the poem are not as revealing, which is why I think that synonyms would be a better way to replace words.
I liked the mad-libs when they made sense, but they were strange and incomprehensible much more often than they were understandable. I don’t think that deformance is really the best way to use your time when trying to analyze a poem.