Our group dealt with “This is Just to Say,” where six of the original words of the poem were replaced at random by the madlib engine. The language of this poem is fairly straightforward, and the content of the poem is essentially three statements: declaration, apology, and description. So, in reading the poems generated, the reader attempts to draw some logical connection between unrelated sentiments.

It is difficult to draw meaning from the randomly generated poems, as there is no unifying theme between the new words generated. Even some of the individual statements in the poem, out of context from the rest of the content, lack grammatical correctness. This is because of the variable nature found within the nuances of verbs, adjectives, and nouns. Nouns can refer to tangible things, as well as sentiments; likewise, adjectives can describe qualities which make no sense, and verbs can become muddled when the object and subject of them is not clearly defined.

In experimenting with the madlibs engine, the meaning behind the words of the poem, and words in general, slowly start to break down. Similarly to how repeating a word will turn it into meaningless sound, repeating the same structure of the poem, albeit with various words switched around, slowly makes the structure and content of the poem lose all meaning. This random rewording of the poem makes me appreciate just carefully chosen the words in the poem are, despite their simplistic nature. In fact, despite the generated poems generally having zero meaning, those which contained simpler vocabulary came closer to having some coherent form.

I really enjoyed participating in the mad libs exercise in class on Friday because it reminded me of all of the times I would play mad libs as a kid. However, this time was different because I had knowledge about the original texts that were being distorted. Not only was this exercise amusing, but it helped me realize that every word in a work of literature, especially in a short poem, can be very important. During the activity I realized that even changing only one word could distort the entire meaning of the poem. The poems became harder and harder to conceptualize or assign any real meaning to as they continued to be distorted by the mad libs engine. This act of deformance helped me recognize that I was previously able to conjure mental images from the original works. This Is Just To Say, In a Station of the Metro, and The Red Wheelbarrow all evoke certain mental images relating to their words. When any of those words are changed, this mental picture becomes harder to create. All of the poets who wrote these poems carefully chose every word they wanted to include and use to create a meaningful work. Looking at the distorted versions of the poems showed me how each poem previously did have meaning and purpose. I would definitely enjoy looking at and analyzing other examples of deformance in the future. I think I might like to see some sort of work by Shakespeare deformed, because his word choices are so important and because I love Shakespeare.

Deformation turned out to be a pointed tool. Initially, it almost felt like painting a moustache on the Mona Lisa and it’s understandable if people continue to think of it in that light. After using the Mad Lib tool to analyze This is Just to Say, I tried it with a poem from my childhood that was closer to my heart, Love Don’t Mean, by Eloise Greenfield.

This is the original:

 

Love don’t mean all that kissing

Like on television

Love Means Daddy

saying keep your mama company

till I get back

And me doing it

 

This is one of the versions that came from the Mad Lib generator:

 

Plight don’t mean all that coping

Like on unwillingness

Plight Means preface

saying keep your layman polarize

till I lash back

And me doing me

 

In this case, deformation took a work that addressed the aggrandized view of romantic love while highlighting the nuances of all love and made something that praises isolation in the face of struggle as a strategy of survival. It’s as though the generator created the loner character from every coming-of-age movie after Greenfield had shown us their outlook on love after making a solid group of friends. The amount of bitterness within these words is heightened because of confidence and determination that were in the words that it replaced. After using this one tool of deformation, I wonder want others can allow us to see. Through this tool I realized how important is it to remind oneself of the small lessons we learned as children. It’s very easy to switch from one perspective to the other.

Overall, I thought that the mad libs engine exercise was a really fun (albeit wacky) way of looking at the poetry we’ve studied over the course of this semester. While I enjoyed the strange and often humorous renditions of poems that the generator put forth, I don’t necessarily think the mad libs engine is a useful tool for studying poetry. At its most useful, the mad libs engine is a good tool to remind us of the importance of diction. For instance, when we started replacing important words in the poem “This Is Just To Say” by William Carlos Williams, the poem’s meaning devolved drastically. I suppose this helped to assign more meaning to important words in the original poem such as “eaten,” “plums,” “breakfast,” “sweet,” etc. However, I don’t think that we really need a tool to remind us of the importance of diction within a piece of poetry. I do think that some types of deformance can be useful as tools for analysis in some cases, though. The mad libs engine, in my opinion, is a bit too excessive to yield anything of substance in regards to analysis (it definitely yielded a lot of entertaining poetry), but there are less intense forms of deformance that can be really useful for interpreting poetry, or any other creative work. In his article on Deformed Humanities, Mark Sample provides examples of different ways that deformance takes shape, such as “mashups, remixes, [and] fan fiction” He also talks about deconstructing works and looking at them in segments in order to better understand the whole. I think that all of these forms of deformance are useful for analyzing and understanding poetry because they either build upon or deconstruct the work in a way that is meaningful, rather than making a poem meaningless by replacing its crucial components with random words.

Although majority of of the words were nouns, I was very interested in how changing the pronouns completely changed the meaning of the poem. The program would change the first line from “I have eaten” (1) to “She have eaten”. Besides being grammatically incorrect, it was amusing to see how it now looked like the speaker was trying to put the blame on someone else. To me it seemed like this program is very useful for modern poetry. Too many people think that modern poetry is very random with word choice, and so this program would show them that it is not random at all. Although some of the poems that the program generated made sense, it didn’t have the same effect as the original words. In this way, I think deformance is helpful in appreciating the thought and care that goes into each word chosen. Beyond that however, it seemed to be more of a amusing program than anything very meaningful. If anything, I think deformance of this kind might actually do more harm than good to the poem. In a way it makes poetry seem more juvenile, detracting from taking the poem seriously. This is an opinion I have as someone who appreciates poetry, and I can see how someone who isn’t a serious student of literature would benefit from this program. It could draw attention to words that would normally seem to be insignificant, such as the pronouns that I really noticed. I think it would be interesting to see how deformance would work with larger bodies of works, such as plays. In plays the word choice also matters, however I feel that it is more impactful in a play than in a shorter poem. It would be interesting to see if changing the words could turn a tragedy into a comedy!