I think the “random words and phrases” I keep seeing in these comments is a bit of an exaggeration. Reading the (completely undocumented) wikipedia article I get the understanding that they crafted these poems using their own previous work, original ideas as well as phrases clipped wholesale from a book of quotations and deliberately convoluted rhymes from a rhyming dictionary etc. Nonetheless they strung them together with some sense of purpose—the selection was not technically random.
If you read an example from that article you will see that it has some continuity—its not the gibberish you would get from having a computer program randomly selecting phrases. So rather what you have is poetry written by poets using an unconventional method for an unconventional purpose. Its not surprising there are those who found this interesting—but I know absolutely nothing of poetry.
Curiously, a similar argument was applied to Sokal’s hoax. It, too, is not random gibberish, and it is not surprising at all that the editors of Social Text found it interesting. But does it carry actual value? Going by Weinberg’s analysis, it has quite a few deliberate physics mistakes that could have been spotted by an undergraduate.
I have no idea how poetry buffs go about spotting obvious mistakes in poetry, but if semi-random stuff repeatedly get accepted as genuine (Wikipedia has a bunch of links under the Literary Hoaxes category), the field in trouble.
I think the “random words and phrases” I keep seeing in these comments is a bit of an exaggeration. Reading the (completely undocumented) wikipedia article I get the understanding that they crafted these poems using their own previous work, original ideas as well as phrases clipped wholesale from a book of quotations and deliberately convoluted rhymes from a rhyming dictionary etc. Nonetheless they strung them together with some sense of purpose—the selection was not technically random.
If you read an example from that article you will see that it has some continuity—its not the gibberish you would get from having a computer program randomly selecting phrases. So rather what you have is poetry written by poets using an unconventional method for an unconventional purpose. Its not surprising there are those who found this interesting—but I know absolutely nothing of poetry.
Curiously, a similar argument was applied to Sokal’s hoax. It, too, is not random gibberish, and it is not surprising at all that the editors of Social Text found it interesting. But does it carry actual value? Going by Weinberg’s analysis, it has quite a few deliberate physics mistakes that could have been spotted by an undergraduate.
I have no idea how poetry buffs go about spotting obvious mistakes in poetry, but if semi-random stuff repeatedly get accepted as genuine (Wikipedia has a bunch of links under the Literary Hoaxes category), the field in trouble.