Link from kottke: The Virginia Quarterly Review did some simple math on the poems that get accepted in their journal, and they came up with interesting results. I never thought of doing text mining on prose, that’s an interesting idea, but I think this comment, lifted from the VQR blog post, says it all:
The only difference
between poetry
and that which is not
poetry
is how you use
the return key.Which may explain why it is a
dead
art form,
Practiced by many
but read by none.
I do read poetry, but at times I do agree with the poster.
March 17th, 2008 at 1:22 pm
Gotta confess: I cribbed the Return Key angle from a previous Gawker posting.
But honestly, there are plenty of poets and almost no one who actually pays for poetry. As in modern painting and sculpture, market value is set not by the quality of the work or the skill required to create it, but by the name of the person who created it (I know: it’s the “I could paint that” argument). How else to explain Maya Angelou
I also did a subsequent posting on the VQ that reproduced what happened when my cat jumped on my keyboard while I was typing the first one. Who knows, maybe it is better than my original “poem”:
The only difference
between poetry
and that which is not
poetry
is how you use
the return key.
Which may explain why it is
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March 17th, 2008 at 1:41 pm
Your cat is obviously as gifted … nay … I dare say MORE gifted than you. Get an agent asap!