Craft Notes
“Furthermore, the amateur poets were more likely to use more emotional words, both negative and positive.”
Y’all relax OK Australia finally figured out contemporary American poetry y’all. Post your scores, losers. > 0.5 is professional and < 0.5 is amateur. Be sure to read the, um, “methodology.” According to poetry journalist Patrick Gaughan, the highest so far (at 4.2) is WCW’s good old wheelbarrow coloring book, and noted anti-poetry skeptic/fiction engineer Jonathan Volk reports that “an untitled Jewel poem just got a 1.17.” Stay tuned for breaking developments. (Discovery credit goes to poetry scientist Anne Cecelia Holmes.)
Tags: For example a publisher who needs a quick way of sorting through the voluminous submissions received on a weekly basis could first select a filtered list by running poems though such an algorithm, In essence poems that use language that is simple and direct are more likely to be reproduced in anthologies, Michael Coleman Dalvean: School of Politics and International Relations, Out of the 925 word sample the word that was easiest to define was “baby” (score = 6.79) and the word that was the hardest to define was “gadfly” (score = 1.92)., The categories used are based common behavioural and cognitive processes and include Negative Emotion, The professional poems were written in the later half 20 th century by poets who have been members of the Academy of American Poets, The study found that the successful poems had fewer syllables per word in their first lines and were more likely to have an initial line consisting of monosyllables, Where a poem was over 500 words it was removed and replaced by another poem by the same poet.
Mike Young’s “Giggle or Stop It” = 1.20885436893
Also, wow, nice tags
One of my poems scored higher than Frank O’Hara’s “The Day Lady Died.” BAM!
I scored 1.87656097561 on the unpublished poem I tried. Clearly you need to give me a book deal, Adam.
4.03246153846, bitches!
this is a fun game, but reading the methodology makes it clear that the creator or creators have not seen dead poets society
also according to the methodology, “warmth” is just slightly more difficult to define than “alimony”
I’ll publish any poem under .4 in Everyday Genius in November. Guidelines: https://publishinggenius.submittable.com/submit/21745
I got a 0.296911877395
The algorithm used has a clear Australian bias. My husband entered this:
G’Day Mate
Dingos howl on Red Rock.
Babies devoured, Fosters on tap.
The wallabies fashioned
after Paul Hogan’s mug.
Something about Vegemite.
That’s not a knife;
this is a knife.
and it got a 3.14328571429
I submitted three of my unpublished poems and got the following scores:
-0.0220048721072
-0.184882803943
0.189744680851
As I’ve long suspected, I’m a poetry amateur.
i entered the first thing that entered my mind, which was “Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols”, and got a score of 3.354
bully for me
publgeni gonna git mad hits brah
and then i entered “bully for me” and got a score of 1.82066666667
so bully for bully for me
and then i entered “bully for bully for me” and got 2.074
so bully for bully for bully for me!!!!!!!!!!!!
“Bollocks for me,” don’t you mean?
Tao Lin’s “Poems That Look Weird” got a -1.74397297297. Appropriate?
I like that this system is accurate to more decimal places than Pitchfork’s rating system. I give it a 7.91358302145.
and then i entered ” “Bollocks for me,” don’t you mean?” and got
-6.37933333333
fer shizzz
http://www.poetryassessor.com/poetry/
Best
cumm on, let’s see it, bitch
Bobby, you are so clearly a 0.296911877396.
But that is a good poem.
Can someone please summarize the device’s criteria/methodology? I glanced at the PDF but am feeling too lazy to really read it.
I’ll understand if no one wants to go to the trouble. I imagine it’s looking for word/grammar variety, lots of polysyllabic words, and for the poem to be in conventional verse? Or something like that?
The Pitchfork review of “Trouble Will Find You” got a 0.34724009324
My above comment (with line breaks) got a 2.184.
I typed in a poem that read
Checkers
Cheez-its
Cum
and got a 2.729
hehe…
Your above comment got a -28.746 (and I’m going to downvote this comment)
That’s actually pretty good, for one of my comments.
8(B/buffalo)
I also only glanced, so this is not fully informed. it was developed by running 100 relatively contemporary (20th century?) poems by famous people and 100 poems from some amateur writing website through the machine with their respective labels (amateur/professional). so the machine just associates whatever is present in the pro poems with pro poems and whatever is present in the amateur poems but *not* in the pro poems with amateur poems. there are a few notes on the differences, Mike pulled some for the tags of this post. one is “The study found that the successful poems had fewer syllables per word in their first lines and were more likely to have an initial line consisting of monosyllables”
That is amazing and wonderful. Thank you!
I just submitted the following poem (see below), which I wrote by copying text from here and adding line breaks. It received a score of 0.638166666667.
I am so totally adding this poem to the collection I’ve been working on!
Here is the poem:
“Written language is relatively more complex than spoken language”
Written language is relatively
more complex than spoken language.
Written language is grammatically
more complex than spoken language.
It has more subordinate clauses, more
“that/to” complement clauses, more
long sequences of prepositional phrases, more
attributive adjectives and more
passives than spoken language.
Written texts are shorter and have longer,
more complex words and phrases. They have
more nominalisations, more noun based phrases,
and more lexical variation. Written texts
are lexically dense compared to spoken
language — they have proportionately more
lexical words than grammatical words.
The following features are common
in academic written texts:
Subordinate clauses/embedding, Complement clauses,
Sequences of prepositional phrases, Participles,
Passive verbs, Lexical density, Lexical
complexity, Nominalisation, Noun-based
phrases, Modification of noun-phrases,
Attributive adjectives.
(Adding, a 0.638166666667 is a real step up for me after my earlier -0.0220048721072, -0.184882803943, and 0.189744680851, respectively. And to put it in further perspective, Frank O’Hara’s “Why I Am Not a Painter” scores a 0.280395939086. Suck it, Frank!)
a low hanging 0.000000000006
i felt really bad when i got that score
Australian poems all score pi.
A group of “non-writer” friends wrote this poem and it got a 3.099:
The autumn leaves fall to dust
I just want to rhyme
Crunch crunch squeak crunch
I once saw a gnome
sticking to my day job i guess. -3.33547368421 for all of my hard work:
“art is subjective
whatever you want to read into this poem is right
i fucked your mom last night”
One this worth mentioning is that the scale used in the paper (>.5, 0, <0). In other words, in the application a score above 0 means the poem has more in common with "professional" poems while a score below 0 means the poem has more in common with an "amateur" poem.
Hope this helps. http://www.poetryassessor.com
If it scores well it probably should be submitted somewhere for publication!
The reason this scores well is that 1) It uses concrete language 2) It has no emotional words (love, fear etc) and 3) it has no psychological words (imagine, ruminate). These are characteristics of professional poetry. This does not mean that this poem is a professional poem; it simply means that it has more in common with the average professional poem than it has with the average amateur poem.
Hope this helps.
Michael Dalvean http://www.poetryassessor.com
This poem is more like a professional poem than it is like an amateur poem. THis is because it is concrete and has few emotion or psychological terms.
boethius’ meter 1 from consolation scored just a tad higher than one of my poems at 2.02270229008, which is surprising because it is filled with non-concrete, emotional and “psychological” words. muses and such.
Carmina qui quondam studio florente peregi,
flebilis heu maestos cogor inire modos.
Ecce mihi lacerae dictant scribenda Camenae
et ueris elegi fletibus ora rigant.
Has saltem nullus potuit peruincere terror,
ne nostrum comites prosequerentur iter.
Gloria felicis olim uiridisque iuuentae,
solantur maesti nunc mea fata senis.
Uenit enim properata malis inopina senectus
et dolor aetatem iussit inesse suam.
Intempestiui funduntur uertice cani
et tremit effeto corpore laxa cutis.
Mors hominum felix, quae se nec dulcibus annis
inserit et maestis saepe uocata uenit.
Eheu, quam surda miseros auertitur aure
et flentes oculos claudere saeua negat!
Dum leuibus male fida bonis fortuna faueret
paene caput tristis merserat hora meum;
nunc quia fallacem mutauit nubila uultum
protrahit ingratas impia uita moras.
Quid me felicem totiens iactastis, amici?
Qui cecidit, stabili non erat ille gradu.
The system was calibrated on contemporary English poems so, although any given text will generate a score, the score only really makes sense if it is a contemporary English poem. It’s like a medical diagnosis system that has been calibrated on a particular population. Using such a system on a very different population will yield results that are not valid.
Hope this helps.
The highest score so far for a poem is 6 for The Image by Robert Hass
Is this from the creators of the “processor”?
(I played with this last night, got lots of shorter poems from 4s all the way up to a 9.934.)
Find this interesting and useful, as I changed “tears” to “blood” in one poem (thinking “tears” might be considered too sappy/emotional) which did, imo, increase the power of the poem (and also raised its score from a high 4 to a 6.83733333333