Oh, Mark, you did have to go there...!

Results for the poem you mentioned, with lines by the following girlypoet dilettantes, artfully arranged into a rabid feminist poetics screed by yours truly:

E Bishop, Pink Dog (Rio de Janeiro): Naked, you trot across the avenue.
Suzanne Noguere, The Scribes: upon the page as if light filtered through

Mary Jo Salter, What Do Women Want?: stops short to raise two cones, one in each hand,
Carolyn Kizer, Three: In the expectation of glory: she writes like a man!


Suzanne Noguere, Whirling Round the Sun: Sometimes it seems almost beyond belief
Marilyn Hacker, Eight Days in April: I broke a glass, got bloodstains on the sheet.


Mary Kinzie, Ringing Words: "Forget," said the voice politic, "that place/
Suzanne Noguere, The Scribes: that is its usefulness. It is the space
Marilyn Taylor, II. Porter Powell's Wife: and slaps me, hard, three times across the face.

Carolyn Kizer, Two (from Pro Femina): Meanwhile, have you used your mind today?
Molly Peacock, Anger Sweetened: we caught and candied it so it would stay
Marilyn Taylor, How Aunt Eudora Became a Post-Modern Poet: Remember, you're a girl. So write that way.

The results?...

Words: 98
(NOTE: The genie works best on texts of more than 500 words.)

Female Score: 90
Male Score: 165

The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: male!

Q.E.D.
Robin

I haven't played the genie game yet, but you can find all kinds of literature these days on the differences between male and female writing (Writing a Woman's Life, by Carolyn Heilbrun, is a good example).

I have always been reluctant to believe in such differences, being of Coleridge's opinion that great minds are androgynous, but what can you do when you're up against science and computers?

PS: I suggest that someone with more time on his hands than I have feed the genie some selections from detective novels by men & women & see what comes back.

I am apparently "male". Guess that's why I go by my initials...

Sylvia Plath's Poetry

Female Score: 1139
Male Score: 1909

The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: male!


Donne's Poetry

Female Score: 2333
Male Score: 1292

The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: female!

Methinks the GG should shut up now and hop back into the lamp!

Hi

Shakespeare may be a woman....but our very own Kate Benedict and Rose Keheller are both men.

You never can tell.....

Alan

I've given some stuff for the GG to analyze. All of my poetry and fiction came back as female except for one out of about 10. The one that came back as male was one where I'd incorporated some dialogue of a transsexual who was living as a female but had been a man. Interesting.

I tested it on my blogs. Everything that was a personal diary-type entry came back as female and the pedantic journal-type entries came back as male. I bet all my papers from college will come back as male, but all of my academic papers are stuck on my messed up computer right now.

Seems that the GG reads personal things as female and more analytical things as male.

"Cherrylog Road" by James Dickey:

Words: 592

(NOTE: The genie works best on texts of more than 500 words.)

Female Score: 998
Male Score: 730

The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: female!

Q
 

"Body Bags" by R. S. Gwynn

Words: 332

(NOTE: The genie works best on texts of more than 500 words.)

Female Score: 215
Male Score: 410

The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: male!


Quien is mas macho?

As an aside to this: do any male poets here dabble (as I do from time to time) with trying to find a "female voice" (or, conversely, female poets a "male voice")?

Are there even such things, really?

If I had confidence in the algorithm underlying this little program it would be a useful test of success!

Some subjects demand to be written from a female perspective, I think.

Just a thought

Philip

I put in the whole of Being the Bad Guy (as fiction) and it came out male 2 to 1. I put in a piece of prose about Light Verse. Same result. I put in a poem where I am SUPPOSED to be a woman. No good. Still male though less so. So it works for me. Anyone tried Henry James? Or Jan Morris?