Talk:Mesostic

Lining up

The mesostic example should line up. This would probably involve scanning one and uploading it as a .png file. Badagnani (talk) 03:54, 29 March 2009 (UTC)

Worse than the lining, this is not a mesostic. There are two types of mesostics: 50% & 100%. In a 50% mesostic, there can be no appearance of the next capitalized letter between the last capitalized letter and the next capitalized letter. In a 100% mesostic, there can be no appearance of either letter between their capitalized appearance. I shall include that statement, in some form, in the article, and will try to fix the mesostic example. James Nicol (talk) 04:24, 25 November 2009 (UTC)

%

John Cage was not noted for his clarity of expression; on the contrary. I had no idea of what he meant by first and second letters until I read James Nicol's note above. I've added them and some further explanation to the article.

I've also removed the final "o" (what the heck?!) from "modesto", which if capitalized is the name of a city in California, but which is not a synonym for "modest" in any sense. At first I thought it might be there to force the capital "T" to be in the "middle" of the line, but the line "tons of lovE" has its capital letter at the end, so that's not really a requirement. If the poem were attributed to Cage or anyone else, of course, it couldn't be changed unless it were demonstrably misquoted, but since there's no attribution, I assume it was written by a Wikipedian as an example, and correction is allowable. --Thnidu (talk) 04:13, 13 April 2013 (UTC)

The mesostic we're using was written by an acquaintance of mine. It was never published, but hung, framed, on the wall of the kitchen he shared with his first wife. He is flattered that it is Wikipedia's example of a 100% mesostic.

Thanks for correcting someone's peculiar typo on "modest". Yes, two of the lines end with the letter of the string (vertical) word, but I don't think that that is totally against the rules. If all lines ended with their capitalized (string) letter, then we might have an acrostic, but, again, a mesostic has rules (that an acrostic does not) about when the letter can appear as part of any word.--James Nicol (talk) 06:18, 24 October 2014 (UTC)

Changes to external links

The mesostic generator at http://www.euph0r1a.net/mesostomatic/ has been taken down, with a message that suggests it will not be put back up. I removed the link and added a new link to another one. Arestelle (talk) 08:28, 18 April 2013 (UTC)

The Mesostic Poem Generator is (back?) up at http://mesostics.sas.upenn.edu/index.html ... indeed the "about the project" page appears to be the source of the Wikipedia article text (see below in References)? There is also the Mesostomatic Poetry Generator at http://vyh.pythonanywhere.com/psmeso/ . -- Richard Holeton (talk) 08:04, 6 January 2018 (UTC)

References

Tagging with Template:Refimprove. I'd rather use Template:Unreferenced, but there are references— they're just no good. What is "Cage 57"? Is 57 a page number? In what book? The title of a book by Cage? (I wouldn't be surprised.) A book published in 1957? Etc. ¢®@¶|̦
--Thnidu (talk) 06:01, 3 April 2017 (UTC)

It looks to me that the article text is taken verbatim from the Mesostic Poem Generator project from a team at the University of Pennsylvania -- unless the UPenn folks got the text from Wikipedia (it doesn't seem that way)? I'm a newbie to talk pages and editing; I hope this is helpful. Richard Holeton (talk) 07:59, 6 January 2018 (UTC)

Re the source of the article text: I believe the UPenn team took it from here, or both took it from elsewhere; they created their mesostic generator a year or two after I made and linked to mine (P.S. Meso; mesostomatic was the name of Matthew McCabe's program). And it looks like the article here hasn't changed much in the meantime. Arestelle (talk) 03:45, 3 October 2019 (UTC)

References