Form vs. Content with ‘Poetry Generators’

I thought looking at all of these different ‘poetry generators’ was pretty interesting. I had never thought of a Mad Libs-type generator to be something that would relate to what we’ve been studying in class, but it is, because it requires the reader’s interactivity to function.

Reworking the ‘personal ad’ into a poem made me think again about the importance of form with regards to content. A personal ad seems like a personal ad until you play around with the structure of the lines, the spacing, the indentation, and the formatting – then you can reconstruct it into a poem and give the same words, or content, entirely different meaning.

These ‘poetry generators’ function on a similar concept – they take random words, and place them in a way so that they form poetry. Even "Conversation", which does not use words at all, just sound, can be manipulated in different ways so that it has different ‘effects’ on the reader/viewer.

By using these poetry generators, we are able to play around with how different forms can give the same words entirely different meanings.