A way to make a rankings more reliable: meta ranking. Ranking of poets; and/or meta moderation of comments; and/or meta ranking of votes. IE, something akin to slashdot meta moderation. It has it's own set of problem, but it undeniably improves the signal-to-noise ratio. You could let people tune how they see the rankings: teenagers could say, for me give high rankings to the pomes my favourite pimple poets rank highly. Others could say, for me give weight to the pomes the Grumpy Old Men rank highly. People are going to subvert any system you create, of course, but the way to make it somewhat accurate is by giving people a CHOICE of insult / praise, and it's WHICH insults/praise they tend to get that slots poets into groups, not how much they get insulted/praised. Because even if their motivation for giving a bad ranking to someone is personal not based on the work, their choice of WHY they're giving a bad ranking will tend to be more accurate (example: I vote zero because this is a mindless teenager with no clue vs. I vote zero because this is an arrogant prick with a stick up his ass vs. I vote zero because this is a twisted, quadriplegic, scat-obsessed troll)

ok, real categories would be something like "teen angs", "hallmark", "incoherent", "scatological", "too stuffy", "too obtuse" etc.

Now that's something I'd be super keen to be involved in designing / implementing. It's a non-trivial, meaty task which would require a ton of discussion & thought to agree on. Coming up with the right set of metarankings would take a lot of work. You'd want to put some time into looking at slashdot & kuro5hin and seeing what kinds of problems/success they've had with their meta-moderation systems.