Anthology Spoiler

I received the following email from Stephen McLaughlin this afternoon, who asked me to post this here:
"One morning about a month ago, I received a message from the Poetics List that began something like 'Announcing Issue 1 of Broken Caterpillar. Featuring new poems by . . . followed by a list of 45 poets' names. I'd seen one of them on Silliman's blogroll, but the rest were just flat names. Barely names -- ethereal text strings. Keep in mind that I receive hundreds of these announcements per year.
I should note, at this point, that I fully support small press publishing and small press writing -- but when you step back (as has been discussed on Ron's blog among other places), the larger picture is funny. Funny as in ha-ha, not nyah-nyah.
So I started a collection of poet names. Once I had around 1500, I asked my friend Jim Carpenter to send me a batch of 5,000 poems composed by Erika T. Carter, his ludicrously advanced poetry generation software. These poems aren't simply random cutups of randomly selected texts. As you can see by reading them, they each have a thematic & stylistic unity unparalleled (so far as I know) in the field of algorithmic poetry generation. As numerous commentors have noted, it's difficult to tell whether some of these things were written by man or machine. Surprisingly, many of the poems in the magazine are actually 'good.' Sort of.
I then wrote a little script to combine my lists of poets and my list of poems and create the LaTeX code I used to generate the PDF itself. A fast and simple process.
My list of poets, I should note, was compiled by hand. Every name was copied and pasted from one of several online sources. The script I wrote removed 99% of duplicate names from my final list, but, naturally, a few repeats got through. For example, 'Bob Cobbing' and 'Bob Cobbing' would be considered different names. Furthermore, there are numerous inappropriate (non-poet) inclusions, as well as many outrageous exclusions. For my part, I find it numbingly hilarious to read blog comments in which people sincerely complain about their or their friends' names' exclusion from an anthology that doesn't exist.
I've also made a followup post here: http://www.forgodot.com/2008/10/issue-1-
polite-clarification.html"
Stephen McLaughlin
Rotterdam, NL