I enjoyed this activity as an entertaining, laid-back way to end the week. When we first read through some of the entries from the Twitter Bots, I was not really fazed. I saw a few somewhat humorous posts, but nothing that made me think differently about the poems; however, when we were able to generate our own bots, it changed my perception of the Mad Libs Engines. I was able to notice the specific words that were changed more clearly, and realize how important they actually were to the original poem. Two words that stood out to me in particular were “sweet” and “cold.” When I first read the poem, all I saw was an apology letter that was clearly not sincere. Once I generated a poem that replaced the words “sweet” and “cold” with other random adjectives, it seemed to jump out at me more. It is quite clear that Williams was trying to emphasize these adjectives and sort of tease the recipient of his letter. He feels no guilt, he really just wants to let the person know that the plums (or “marques,” “dens,” “kegs,” etc.) were extremely delicious (“pitiful” or “unreasoning”?).

I also decided to try this engine out with the lyrics to the first stanza of “Guns and Ships” from Hamilton. It was pretty entertaining, and I enjoyed that the word following “global” always ended up being something unfortunate such as “disparity” or “deportation.”

I feel like deformance can be useful for certain people, because it does make specific words stand out, and sometimes there are strange coincidences. Mostly, though, I just think it is entertaining and a fun tool to play around with and see how many words you can change in one poem.