Back in 2001, I was amazed to learn that I had won second place in the Perl poetry contest for my submission of Jabberwocky. It was published in SysAdmin Magazine (which, at that point, was also The Perl Journal). That was really cool, but it had slowly slipped my mind over the years.

It recently jumped out at me when I received an email from Susanne, a student at The Free University of Berlin. She's working on her master thesis in comparative literature. Her thesis is on, well, code poetry. And Jabberwocky is one of the three poems she's analyzing. She knows some coding, but not Perl. So she wanted a hand in deciphering what it was that I had written.

I was happy to help out. I was curious how she had run across Jabberwocky, so I poked around on Google a bit to see what references there were to it. She had seen it on Perlmonks. But I was astonished to find this flattering review of Jabberwocky, along with a reference to it in this Wiki.

Wow. I was really thrown off by all this. I'm surprised people understood it, much less enjoyed it :-) It was my first attempt at Perl poetry, and there's a number of things I'd consider changing about it, which is probably why I have trouble with all this attention :-)

You can read it at one of the links above, see below for my commentary that I sent to Susanne. Be warned that the explanation is for someone who really doesn't know Perl well, and takes away from the flow, and any cleverness that it may have... it's like trying to explain a sunset, it's much better to just watch it :-)

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