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How do you judge a poetry competition?
by Filligree 2y ago
How do you judge a poetry competition?
- hk__2 2y agoThe same you judge the olympic break-dancing competition: with human juges that rate competitors based on a handful of criteria.
- riehwvfbk 2y agoThe criteria: 95% politics.
- DiggyJohnson 2y agoYour cynicism doesn't match reality.
- riehwvfbk 2y agoIt matches my reality perfectly, but maybe it doesn't match yours. When medals are clawed back years after the competition and awarded to the loser - there is no other explanation. And the loser with a medal they didn't win is even more of a loser.
- DiggyJohnson 2y agoI'm not arguing that this never happens, I'm arguing at the magnitiude: > 95%
- riehwvfbk 2y agoOK, it's 90%. Or 70%. Is that better? :)
- hk__2 2y agoThat’s what you say when you don’t accept your defeat but it’s hard to prove. I’ve seen the finals and the Canadian guy who won was clearly better than the French one; if it were 95% politics the French would probably have won.
- HideousKojima 2y agoJust looked up videos of the first and second place medalists for breakdancing this year. It was decent, but I've seen better breakdancing in random videos taken on the streets of LA back in the 80's, for example. Or pretty much every single sequence in Breakin' and Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo.
- hk__2 2y agoIt might have to do with the fact that was the very first edition at the Olympics. It may also be the last because it won’t be there at Los Angeles in 2028.
- matrix2003 2y agoPlaying devil’s advocate, many of the judging criteria for the sports seem pretty subjective. For example if diving or gymnastics was purely objective, you wouldn’t need multiple judges (or any). Track and field is a lot more straightforward in most cases. I would even go as far to say the “criteria” the judges are looking for have some analogous counterparts in poetry. I think breakdancing was a sport for this Olympics, so poetry doesn’t seem like much of a stretch. Maybe it’s just not “exciting” to modern people?
- jerf 2y agoGymnastics and diving have had multiple judges for another reason, which is that the nominally objective portions of the judging involved spotting things at the edge of human perception. (That is, I'm discounting the obviously subjective things like "style".) The judging is definitely not just "hey, that looked good, I think I liked that 8.5 worth"; you can tell just by listening to the commentary. Things like "they're attempting an 8.6 point dive" and "that'll be two tenths off". They're often not guessing at the numbers in question, though it may be a tossup whether the human judges see the same thing the commentators did. There has been some discussion of moving to computer vision analysis for these portions. While one could easily judge poetry by equally objective metrics, I don't think it's hard to imagine what the result would be once the min-maxers get into the game. Love! love love love love love poet, love! hate no! love love love throw it. .,!.,!.,,..,,,.!!!!.,.,,.,,!!..,.! rhyme time lime slime mime mime love, a a a a a a glove o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o love.
- sdwr 2y agoI actually liked that poem! Funny to think that the Olympics started out as LARPing ancient greece. Tradition old and new at the same time
- dhosek 2y agoThere was a scene in the not particularly accurate First Olympics miniseries back in 1984 where the college students looked at books about the ancient Olympics and saw that the athletes competed in the nude so they came out of the building, sheepishly, in the nude and were sent back by their coach to put some clothes on.
- micromacrofoot 2y agosame way you judge anything else, it's not a science
- esafak 2y agoJust like the sprint races then?
- Zambyte 2y agoThose aren't decided by judges, they are decided by clocks. Olympic events decided by judges include things like figure skating, gymnastics, and diving.
- dagw 2y agoThose events aren't decided by the judges just going on how 'cool' they think the performance was, but by comparing how close to perfect (as defined in the rule book) the techniques the athlete did was and then giving it a score based on how that technique is scored in the rule book. The rulebook will say something like "technique A is worth 4.5 points; subtract 0.1-0.3 points if the arms aren't straight throughout the whole technique...". The judges role is then to judge if the arms where in fact straight or not. These sports are a lot more objective than people think.
- Zambyte 2y agoAnd the same can be applied to poetry, no?
- dagw 2y agoRank the different poetic metres from lowest to highest score? What is objectively the hardest type of metaphors to execute perfectly? How many fewer points should a simile get compared to an equivalent metaphor? Are onomatopoeia worth any points? List all the allowed poetry topics and then given them a base difficultly score from 1-5. Once you have finished writing the rulebook for Olympic Poetry, do you think the poetry that would result from people going through that rulebook and min-maxing their poem would actually be interesting.
- Y_Y 2y agoFastest poem, longest poem, saddest poem etc
- GuB-42 2y agoJudging by how thing goes in the Olympics and high level competition in general, probably using technical criteria. Like rhymes, meters, and form, quality of delivery with proper prononciation, rhythm and lack of hesitation, grammatical correctness, etc... Maybe no emotion will come out of it, but writing a sonnet with perfect rime riche an two alliterations delivered with perfect pitch and with the accuracy of a metronome will certainly win gold.
- Gupie 2y agowhen each competitor would use one of their country's official languages and poetic forms.