Posted by Phil M on July 28, 2003 at 04:27:33:
In Reply to: Re: two suggestions for version 2.0 posted by Shawn Burgess on July 27, 2003 at 14:31:01:
: As an opinion, I am a bit against adding rules to make the poems behave more "properly". As David said, serendipidous events could be expunged. I return to the example of e.e. cummings breaking all sense of verse and violating most of the "rules" of poetry. More modern poets draw from his (her?) poems today than the Shakespearian sonnets (for better or worse). Evolution is whimsical and chancy, but that is also the beauty of it. The art here is how you get to the poems, not the poems themselves per se.
Agreement comes from this corner, as well. When I first heard about the project I was trying to work out the mechanism I would use, and had ideas about rhyming, meter and even a limited grammar-check.
When I then I experienced it 'in the raw' (and, oh boy was it raw, prior to the influx of help that SlashDot and others sent this way) I loved it.
My only complaint at the moment is that shorter poems do seem to be thriving (though #11865 seems to have bucked the trend), but that would be entirely because the 'environment' consists of people with different tastes than mine, I presume, and so I count myself as an outlying environmental effect.
For the record, I like reasonably long poems with plenty of potential (after mutation/recombination) over shorter ones that are almost right but hard to improve on. Others here will have differing views, of course. As a caveat, I also like any poem with the word "hex" in it, and that may skew my view in its favour unless its really short... :)