The Wikipedia-based poetry project is working differently now. I've taught it to combine Markov chain results with raw bits of related WP pages. As a result, I'm getting farther away from a purely generative model and closer to one reflecting human writing. It still has some distance to cover. Here's a recent example:

he was
arrested at his home
in bloomington, minnesota. the
eastern half
he once entertained the possibility that any
could pass 32nd state on may 11, 1858, created from the
braddock takes
maggie with him after that moved to the term article is also used loosely by some
to include the determiner some. use of the prize
is not used at
present. the hurricanes' aim to
she also included the policy
of isolationism; the
historian manfred the worst wreck in the prussian minister of
war also used loosely
by
some to include the determiner

It's always going to sound like an encycopedia, but eventually it will sound like a self-aware encyclopedia wracked with dread.