I know I'm a bit late. Your dialogue between you and ChatGPT to write good heroic couplets is amusing and thought-provoking. Thanks. I'm waiting for the whole AI roar to settle down. I'm not worried, personally, but I don't have anything at stake as far as I can tell. Right now I'm reading a lot about the Catholic history of America [The Puritan's Empire, Converting California: Indians and Franciscans in the Missions, Continental ambitions : Roman Catholics in North America : the Colonial experience, and more] because I'm supposed to be writing a book about St. Junipero Serra and the American Saints for the Benedict XVI Institute. I tried many times to get started actually writing the chapters, but now I realize I need to understand the overall history better to write intelligently about the significance of the lives of the saints who the B16 Institute has chosen to honor. I just finished a Substack post about Dürer's Seven Sorrows of Mary Nuremberg altarpiece in time for the upcoming 9/15 feast, and in the process of research, I found out many details that fascinated me about how connected the altarpiece was with the origins of the protestant schism. I hope my Substack readers are fascinated too. I'm taking Ryan Wilson's poetry class through Catholic Literary Arts, and I am greatly pleased. I studied poetry in the 70s and technique was not taught. Even though I've won a few prizes for my poetry, and published some poems, and one of my poems was commissioned to be set as an Advent hymn by a young composer by the B16 institute, I struggle with meter. What I want to say keeps forcing itself out of the poetic limits. What else? Submitting my memoir pieces, essays, and poetry here and there with some acceptances. Making arrangements to attend the Catholic Imagination Conference at Notre Dame at the end of October and hoping to meet some of you there. I guess that's enough, though there's more. Besides just keeping my old house and old body together.
I so enjoyed Franklin P Adam's A New York Child's Garden of Verses. Thank you for introducing me to this fun poem. I have since been looking for his book of these verses in print. So far, I've not found any print versions.
I did however, get a copy of Innocent Merriment from the library. It is an anthology of fun poems selected by Franklin P. Adams. While there are many poems in this volume you could post with your analysis, there are two I will suggest.
"America I Love You" by Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby. This one is in the Burlesque-Parody' section of the book. Clearly written in another era, the lightness belies serious honesty.
mehitabel sings a song by Don Marquis is another suggestion. I was intrigued by the use of "i m" in place of spelling out I am. When you read it, you pronounce the words the same, however it is spelled. It is written in all lower case, including the title. I would be interested in learning about this poem which is in the 'satire' section of the book. What is being satirized, why the use of lower case, the reason for unusual spelling.
Thank you for the link to that complete and informative explanation of Archy and Mehitabel. Now reading those poems ,I can laugh as I picture Archy trying to type not knowing there is a Caps lock key.
Hmm, did Mr. Cummings get the idea of lower case from archy?
Sep 6·edited Sep 6Liked by Sally Thomas, Joseph Bottum
I'm about 2/3 of the way through The Wild Orchid, one of Sigrid Undset's novels that's not Kristin or Olav, set in the early 20th c. Not surprisingly not really in the class with the medieval monuments, but very much worth reading. There's explicit wrangling with Catholicism seen from the outside, as she herself must have seen it, which obviously is not possible in the medieval setting.
Also reading and often re-reading Helen Pinkerton's Collected Poems, A Journey of the Mind. I had never heard of her but must have seen an intriguing review when it was published not very long ago. I think her lengthy dramatic monologues in the voices of various 19th c Americans may be the best of the book, though it required consulting Wikipedia for me to know who Lemuel Shaw, for instance, was, and why I should care what he thought.
Selected Essays by Dr Johnson, in Penguin Classics, edited by David Womersley. Also, Comic Inferno, a science fiction short story collection by Brian Aldiss.
Well, I have read several stories out of Sally's new collection, The Blackbird and Other Stories. Quite enjoying them.
I'm just finishing up a novel by Penelope Lively, How It All Began. It was just the light, end of summer read I needed. It starts with an elderly woman being mugged in London and breaking her hip and then follows how the mugging changes the lives of an assortment of people, several of whom don't know her, never meet her. The set up feels a bit contrived, and I didn't actually like most of the characters, but I did find myself loving the character of Charlotte, the one with the broken hip, who is a retired school teacher and her relationship with Anton, an immigrant from Eastern Europe who she is teaching how to read English, primarily using children's books. They start with Where the Wild Things Are. And I liked how several of the characters took unexpected turns.
I'm reading a biography that I received for my birthday: Sigrid Undset: Reader of Hearts.
And I just finished reading Octavia Butler's novels Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, rather disturbing dystopian novels. I find myself mulling them over and longing for someone to discuss them with. The protagonist rejects her Baptist upbringing and founds a new "religion" called Earthseed which worships Change as God.
I've started a new Substack and am enjoying writing again, having a place to dump various thoughts about poetry and books and other things.
And I've read one Penelope Lively --- Family Album? --- can't remember the exact title now. I remember liking it, but not as much as I like anything by my preferred Penelope, Penelope Fitzgerald.
And glad you're enjoying the short stories! Many thanks.
I got started with some of Penelope Lively's children's books when I was looking for more of the kind of historical time travel books for Sophie who was very into that genre. And then I stumbled across this one on Libby when I was looking for something light to read, hoping for a children's book. But the preview looked interesting and I was hooked.
We've always run art about Erato, the muse of lyric poetry, in these open-mic threads — but I'm especially taken with today's 17th-cen. painting by Michel Dorigny. Cupid is a common character in these paintings, but here we get the unsympathetic muse pushing away an annoying Cupid-esque putto with ill-behaved cherubs around her.
Now I know who my dog was in a former life. She was that Cupid-esque putto. Any minute now that putto is going to start barking at Erato, and if that doesn't get her attention, he's going to chew her wrist.
This delights me, especially the "denizen of the underwater blues." I think that in any culture (modernist, formalist, any circle at all) where prestige is valued over what is actually said, and the practice of craft, AI has a good chance of becoming a celebrated author. My apprehension is that it's working with human materials and techniques (somewhat like we, in our "creation", work with God's materials and techniques?) but without a soul, though I'm not sure if I grasp it all right. If we compromise our soul we don't really have a lot to help us feel the authenticity of a work, regardless of how it's produced. To comfort myself, though, I remember how that isn't really a new problem. The AI part is new, but cultures have always been this way: before computers there are stories like the Emperor's New Clothes. I hope there will always be children who recognise if the emperor isn't really wearing anything.
Last year's AI attempting heroic couplets is rather funny...
To me, the key point is that AI is not a mind, and it can only ever produce content as good as its inputs. While it may improve at "understanding" concepts like heroic couplets, it can only essentially remix ideas and patterns from the inputs it has been trained on. If AI models are given massive amounts of whatever poetry is available on the Internet, it will receive lots of doggerel and forgettable verse along with some genuinely good poetry. So even the technical skill would be limited, unless someone intentionally scraped only high quality poetry to create a large amount of "good" training data. (Or as the mass of available training data grows to include other AI-generated content, the results could get even worse.) So while the technical skill will likely improve, the actual ideas can only be derivative of the training inputs - there can be no new insights, which is one of the key features of good poetry. If the goal is simply pleasant, measured lines on a given topic, then AI will be able to accomplish a good deal. For mundane greeting cards or run-of-the-mill children's picture books, it will reach a point where it can stand in for what already exists, just as it can already create music that is pleasantly forgettable. But I struggle to see how it could create poetry of lasting value.
Chiasms have been on my mind quite a lot over the summer. I know there are murmurings and rumblings about formalist poetry out there; although I respect and encourage the formalist approach, there are simply too many poems in free verse which I've fallen in love with for me to unequivocally throw my lot in with the formalists. The chiastic structure, though, seems a way for poets to write in free verse while also adhering to formalist structures . . thoughts?
I guess I'd say that a lot depends on what you mean by "free verse" and "form." Chiastic structure would be an example of a form (if memory serves me, it's one of the forms John Hollander demonstrates in his handbook, Rhyme's Reason). A poem written according to the rules of that structure would not be free verse, in my view, even if it suggests free verse to the reader whose idea of form runs out at rhyme and meter. There would still be rules, and fairly challenging ones to fulfill in any kind of interesting way, even if the rules didn't entail set metrical or rhyming patterns. I don't know enough about Hebrew poetry, beyond that basic principle of repetition and inversion, to know how it's meant to work metrically, or whether rhyme is a formal principle in that tradition. I really only know it through English Bible translation, which makes me suspect that I have missed a lot.
I've written poems in counted syllabics, taking on rules and patterns from Asian or Welsh forms (and I'll admit that not knowing the languages in which those forms originated means that I probably don't fulfill the demands of the forms all that accurately or well) --- those poems often read like free verse, because they're not strictly metrical, to the ear listening for something like iambic pentameter, and their rhyming patterns often involve internal rather than end rhymes. The forms themselves are pretty intricate and demanding, no less so (and often more so) than the sonnet. The results sound kind of free-verse-like. But they're definitely not free-verse poems.
I think, too, reflecting on many poems that I have admired, that if a poem is good, even if it appears not to have followed any of the standard, expected, obvious rules, often a careful reading will reveal some evidence of formal pressure, however idiosyncratic, that the poet has imposed on the writing.
I also recall a comment by Dana Gioia on our first Open Thread post, reminding us that "free verse" as we typically use that term is actually a mistranslation of the French "vers libre," which entailed unmetered but rhyming lines --- one formal restraint loosened, but definitely not a total absence of traditional rules. This recollection is now sending me down a T.S. Eliot rabbit hole, to his essay "Reflections on Vers Libre," published the same year as Prufrock and Other Observations: https://theworld.com/~raparker/exploring/tseliot/works/essays/reflections_on_vers_libre.html
You asked for thoughts . . . these are some thoughts. :)
I was indeed thinking of the popular conception of "free verse" which equates it with unrhymed and unmetrical poetry (Billy Collins or Masters' "Spoon River Anthology" come to mind right away). Of course, as you rightly mention, even those poets probably have some kind of formal structure going on in their work — maybe at the level of line and stanza instead of syllable and meter, but it would still be a form.
My conception of Hebrew poetry comes mostly from Robert Alter's book "The Art of Biblical Poetry," where he maintains that Hebrew verse is usually arranged in couplets of two or three stresses per line — which is, obviously, not encountered in the English translations (at least, not in the translations I've read).
If you’d like an interesting attempt to get at the formal elements of free verse (rather, all poetry including it, or after it), see Robert Hass’s A Little Book on Form.
Oh, right, I haven't read that. I read Charles O. Hartman's Free Verse: A Prosody in grad school, but found it kind of meh (for reasons I can't now remember) --- but I did take at least one prosody class that had the prosody of "free" verse as its focus.
At the time, I was especially interested in all those poets who came of age just after the midcentury --- James Wright, for example --- who had begun in strictly formal verse but had made some move away from it. Wright's Shall We Gather at the River, which I think was his last book (?) particularly showcases his facility for moving in and out of rhyme and meter, and I admire those poems a lot --- at least as much as I admire the early sonnet, "Saint Judas."
And a possibly disconnected thought --- I really like this little bit of Eliot's vers libre essay: "We may therefore formulate as follows: the ghost of some simple metre should lurk behind the arras in even the 'freest' verse; to advance menacingly as we doze, and withdraw as we rouse. Or, freedom is only truly freedom when it appears against the background of an artificial limitation." He also notes that "there is no escape from metre; there is only mastery." And I want to say that that's right --- the best writers of what we think of as "free" verse are writers who have mastered meter, or at least have their inner ears sharply tuned to it on an instinctive level (because they've read well), and are not mastered by their lack of facility for it.
Yes, now that you mention it --- I haven't read that Robert Alter book, but I thought I'd heard somewhere that there was actually a metrical pattern in Hebrew poetry, and I'm sure it was discussions of that book that tipped me off. I took a course in Hebrew poetry, actually, in one phase of grad school, but in the entirety of the course, I don't think meter came up at all --- though after 35 years, my memory of the class is pretty hazy!
And I think about poets influenced by the cadences of, at least, biblical poetry in English translation --- Walt Whitman, often cited as a father of American free verse, especially. For all their sprawl, those poems often have a lot going on formally and really aren't nearly as "tennis without a net" as we might initially think they are.
Michael O'Connor's Hebrew Verse Structure, and Alonso Schokel's A Manual of Hebrew Poetics are both very good accounts of Hebrew versification (O'Connor is more complicated, but I am assured is the better account). It is based on the number of stresses per section with some variation, not unlike Winters' account of free verse. The Grail translation of the psalms is the only one I know in English that tries to replicate it.
Thanks for those suggestions! And I didn't know that about the Grail Psalms, though now that you mention it, that makes sense. Just looking randomly at Psalm 147 in Christian Prayer (don't have the whole breviary set), and I can see how regularly trimeter it is, a thing I know I've been hearing all along, in all the psalms of the Liturgy of the Hours, but didn't know why.
I admit that I'm beguiled by Eliot's essay on vers libre, especially the closing line: . ". . . and we conclude that the division between Conservative Verse and vers libre does not exist, for there is only good verse, bad verse, and chaos."
In terms of my current reading, I just finished a wonderful WWII historical fiction book: Lisette's List by Susan Vreeland. It is set in rural France from a period of just before the war to a year or so after and uses art as part of the driver of the plot. The war becomes part of the setting rather than the focus as the story explores the way that displaced Parisian Lisette finds a way to live a life she didn't expect. It was very, very good.
I'm almost finished with the audio version of The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker and narrated by George Guidall. This too, I find to be an excellent book. The narration is fantastic and although it is over 19 hours long it has never seemed that way. This is one that I will likely seek out the book version and read it properly at some point. The book explores many interesting themes in the course of charting the story of the two main characters, who are exactly what the title says: a golem and a jinni. Both are displaced in late 1800's (I think) New York city amoung the immigrant communities.
The last book I'm reading right now is The Disappearing Spoon by Sam Kean. It is a non-fiction book focused on the periodic table of the elements, mostly in the form of anecdotal stories about the elements themselves and their chemistry. I am not very far in, but thus far I am finding it a bit dry. It is very heavy on the chemistry, and I suppose it is nice to discover that I have not forgotten all of my work in college, but I'm not finding the anecdotes particularly interesting. This is one I will likely give up on before I finish. But then, as I explore genres this year, I am finding that I don't particularly enjoy non-fiction for my leisure reading unless I am reading it for a specific purpose.
I very much enjoyed The Golem and the Jinni. I loved the way it's simultaneously fantasy and historical fiction about the immigrant experience in New York. I read an interview with the author which said she was trying to write straight historical fiction and it wasn't really working. Then someone suggested that as fantasy was what she enjoyed reading, maybe she should try writing that instead. And then some alchemy happened and the two fused.
I rather liked The Disappearing Spoon when I read it with my high schooler last year. Some of it was dry, but compared to other nonfiction we found it quite entertaining and educational.
Lisette's List sounds quite intriguing. I might have to look it up.
My husband has a poetry friend at work; they have been sending each other silly AI poems for more than a year now, I think. They don't get too specific about the form since neither of them has any formal poetry experience. The poems always end up silly and trite, although they do manage to get a bit of a greeting card flavor if the prompt includes emotional content. Occasionally, my husband will get quite silly and send replies to his boss in AI poetry.
I really don't think that AI poetry is in any danger of replacing an inspired poet ever. AI cannot feel, cannot truly express emotion in the way that a good poet does. It cannot use unique and inspired metaphor. Dear hubby says that there might be value in AI poetry because it allows for an exploration of poetry enough that a non-poetical (his word, not mine) person might come to an appreciation for 'real' poetry. Personally, I would say that the poems and analysis you do here have done more for my appreciation than I expect any AI could ever do.
Sep 5·edited Sep 5Liked by Sally Thomas, Joseph Bottum
AI doing language reminds me above all of one of those silly shows, Ghost Hunters or suchlike. One of the devices they use to wow the gullible records white noise and then boosts the signal, filters it in braindead fashion, and continues, basically amplifying certain peaks in the initial noise into distinct bands. Sometimes these bands are similar to vowel formants (the resonance peaks of the vocal tract, the three lowest of which encode vowels) with noisier portions around them close enough to consonant noise to be heard as consonants, and then the listeners project voice onto them in a folie à foule of apophenia. (Plus sometimes, I was amused to read, these devices also record radio signals reflected off meteorites, which is infinitely cooler than anything on those shows.) This is the sort of stuff I played with on my own in the phonetics lab late at night in grad school, so I know from apophenia. Humans create patterns; AI sometimes discerns those patterns. More than that, AI is getting better and better at discerning patterns. It does not, however, do anything but process patterns. If it does produce something readable as good poetry it will be random luck combined with the use of patterns that to humans have meaning; to AI it's just a mechanical product of patterns given to it rather than patterns it creates, as humans do.
(More than that, AI language tools are good for strictly regimented language use--it's very useful for populating forms with necessary data. AI "art" is entertaining especially for parodic uses, especially if a particular artist's style is specified--Star Wars as filmed by Tarkovsky, as one example, or alien spaceports as painted by Edward Hopper, to give two genuine examples I really enjoyed--or if cats are involved. It's a tool and should only be judged as a tool, and in law, IMHO, it fits into copyright in the same way any tool does--does it infringe copyright? Then too bad, that use is off-limits. I have read far too many AI enthusiasts who elide the difference between the creative use of pre-existing material and its mechanical use for me to take their philosophical acumen seriously.)
As for reading, I've finally gotten a flood of editing work after a summer drought, so I've done little reading for pleasure besides finishing up three of the books I mentioned reading earlier, with two exceptions. (1) I've gotten through most of the stories in Elizabeth Bowen's Encounters, which are very good, and (2) I have read about the first quarter of Michael Seth's Concise History of Pre-Modern Korea. It's the best I've read in English--there are many good Korean works translated into English, but they assume more familiarity with the country and background knowledge than a foreign reader is likely to have starting out, and it's also fairly up-to-date on recent scholarship. My impression is that it also has a solid treatment of the ideological underpinnings of the different Korean historiographical traditions, which is something you need to beware of when studying Korean history
I’m beginning the third draft of my memoir of my father (around 68K words at the moment). My mom’s family reunion in early August inspired the writing of a poem on family Sundays when I was a kid. My mother’s mother and my father’s parents ran country stores about a mile apart, so we were able to visit both sides of the family every Sunday, including many of my aunts and uncles and their children.
As to reading, I’m slowly getting through “Spending the Winter” by our own Joseph Bottum, Auden’s “The Shield of Achilles” (the recently published critical edition), and Jason Guriel’s verse novel, “Forgotten Work.” These lines of Guriel, though full of pathos, made me laugh aloud: “Having peaked at metrical expression / In his youth, and stranded on Parnassus, / Daryl Hine could only watch as asses / Like Allen Ginsberg stormed the world below, / While Hine, basecamped with gods, acquired snow.” All three books are well worth the time.
Finally, I’m preparing to build my second modest wall of field stone. The walls are like my poems—they have no purpose but themselves.
The most interesting machine-written poems I've come across were produced sometime before 2016. A fellow poet fed thousands of lines of Whitman into a neural net (his term) and asked it (how, I don't know) to write a poem. It produced lines that he then edited. I never saw the original lines, but his edited versions were odd and moving.
I do think that eventually AI will be able to write high quality poetry. That if it were submitted somewhere anonymously the editor might not know it was created by a computer. I’m not sure what the ramifications of this will be, but I think it places an onus on us human poets and writers to continue to work hard and take our work very seriously lest it become trivial because everyone is “doing” it.
As to the rest, I am still continuing with the Collected Poetry of EAR, and just finished Isaac and Archibald, and occasionally dipping into the English renaissance poets, mainly Jonson. And I am trying to write a poem on Sarah.
I know I'm a bit late. Your dialogue between you and ChatGPT to write good heroic couplets is amusing and thought-provoking. Thanks. I'm waiting for the whole AI roar to settle down. I'm not worried, personally, but I don't have anything at stake as far as I can tell. Right now I'm reading a lot about the Catholic history of America [The Puritan's Empire, Converting California: Indians and Franciscans in the Missions, Continental ambitions : Roman Catholics in North America : the Colonial experience, and more] because I'm supposed to be writing a book about St. Junipero Serra and the American Saints for the Benedict XVI Institute. I tried many times to get started actually writing the chapters, but now I realize I need to understand the overall history better to write intelligently about the significance of the lives of the saints who the B16 Institute has chosen to honor. I just finished a Substack post about Dürer's Seven Sorrows of Mary Nuremberg altarpiece in time for the upcoming 9/15 feast, and in the process of research, I found out many details that fascinated me about how connected the altarpiece was with the origins of the protestant schism. I hope my Substack readers are fascinated too. I'm taking Ryan Wilson's poetry class through Catholic Literary Arts, and I am greatly pleased. I studied poetry in the 70s and technique was not taught. Even though I've won a few prizes for my poetry, and published some poems, and one of my poems was commissioned to be set as an Advent hymn by a young composer by the B16 institute, I struggle with meter. What I want to say keeps forcing itself out of the poetic limits. What else? Submitting my memoir pieces, essays, and poetry here and there with some acceptances. Making arrangements to attend the Catholic Imagination Conference at Notre Dame at the end of October and hoping to meet some of you there. I guess that's enough, though there's more. Besides just keeping my old house and old body together.
I so enjoyed Franklin P Adam's A New York Child's Garden of Verses. Thank you for introducing me to this fun poem. I have since been looking for his book of these verses in print. So far, I've not found any print versions.
I did however, get a copy of Innocent Merriment from the library. It is an anthology of fun poems selected by Franklin P. Adams. While there are many poems in this volume you could post with your analysis, there are two I will suggest.
"America I Love You" by Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby. This one is in the Burlesque-Parody' section of the book. Clearly written in another era, the lightness belies serious honesty.
mehitabel sings a song by Don Marquis is another suggestion. I was intrigued by the use of "i m" in place of spelling out I am. When you read it, you pronounce the words the same, however it is spelled. It is written in all lower case, including the title. I would be interested in learning about this poem which is in the 'satire' section of the book. What is being satirized, why the use of lower case, the reason for unusual spelling.
We explained about Marquis — a favorite — here:
https://poemsancientandmodern.substack.com/p/todays-poem-archy-confesses
Thank you for the link to that complete and informative explanation of Archy and Mehitabel. Now reading those poems ,I can laugh as I picture Archy trying to type not knowing there is a Caps lock key.
Hmm, did Mr. Cummings get the idea of lower case from archy?
I'm about 2/3 of the way through The Wild Orchid, one of Sigrid Undset's novels that's not Kristin or Olav, set in the early 20th c. Not surprisingly not really in the class with the medieval monuments, but very much worth reading. There's explicit wrangling with Catholicism seen from the outside, as she herself must have seen it, which obviously is not possible in the medieval setting.
Also reading and often re-reading Helen Pinkerton's Collected Poems, A Journey of the Mind. I had never heard of her but must have seen an intriguing review when it was published not very long ago. I think her lengthy dramatic monologues in the voices of various 19th c Americans may be the best of the book, though it required consulting Wikipedia for me to know who Lemuel Shaw, for instance, was, and why I should care what he thought.
Selected Essays by Dr Johnson, in Penguin Classics, edited by David Womersley. Also, Comic Inferno, a science fiction short story collection by Brian Aldiss.
Well, I have read several stories out of Sally's new collection, The Blackbird and Other Stories. Quite enjoying them.
I'm just finishing up a novel by Penelope Lively, How It All Began. It was just the light, end of summer read I needed. It starts with an elderly woman being mugged in London and breaking her hip and then follows how the mugging changes the lives of an assortment of people, several of whom don't know her, never meet her. The set up feels a bit contrived, and I didn't actually like most of the characters, but I did find myself loving the character of Charlotte, the one with the broken hip, who is a retired school teacher and her relationship with Anton, an immigrant from Eastern Europe who she is teaching how to read English, primarily using children's books. They start with Where the Wild Things Are. And I liked how several of the characters took unexpected turns.
I'm reading a biography that I received for my birthday: Sigrid Undset: Reader of Hearts.
And I just finished reading Octavia Butler's novels Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, rather disturbing dystopian novels. I find myself mulling them over and longing for someone to discuss them with. The protagonist rejects her Baptist upbringing and founds a new "religion" called Earthseed which worships Change as God.
I've started a new Substack and am enjoying writing again, having a place to dump various thoughts about poetry and books and other things.
Oh, I liked that Aidan Nichols book on Undset!
And I've read one Penelope Lively --- Family Album? --- can't remember the exact title now. I remember liking it, but not as much as I like anything by my preferred Penelope, Penelope Fitzgerald.
And glad you're enjoying the short stories! Many thanks.
I got started with some of Penelope Lively's children's books when I was looking for more of the kind of historical time travel books for Sophie who was very into that genre. And then I stumbled across this one on Libby when I was looking for something light to read, hoping for a children's book. But the preview looked interesting and I was hooked.
We've always run art about Erato, the muse of lyric poetry, in these open-mic threads — but I'm especially taken with today's 17th-cen. painting by Michel Dorigny. Cupid is a common character in these paintings, but here we get the unsympathetic muse pushing away an annoying Cupid-esque putto with ill-behaved cherubs around her.
Now I know who my dog was in a former life. She was that Cupid-esque putto. Any minute now that putto is going to start barking at Erato, and if that doesn't get her attention, he's going to chew her wrist.
This delights me, especially the "denizen of the underwater blues." I think that in any culture (modernist, formalist, any circle at all) where prestige is valued over what is actually said, and the practice of craft, AI has a good chance of becoming a celebrated author. My apprehension is that it's working with human materials and techniques (somewhat like we, in our "creation", work with God's materials and techniques?) but without a soul, though I'm not sure if I grasp it all right. If we compromise our soul we don't really have a lot to help us feel the authenticity of a work, regardless of how it's produced. To comfort myself, though, I remember how that isn't really a new problem. The AI part is new, but cultures have always been this way: before computers there are stories like the Emperor's New Clothes. I hope there will always be children who recognise if the emperor isn't really wearing anything.
Last year's AI attempting heroic couplets is rather funny...
To me, the key point is that AI is not a mind, and it can only ever produce content as good as its inputs. While it may improve at "understanding" concepts like heroic couplets, it can only essentially remix ideas and patterns from the inputs it has been trained on. If AI models are given massive amounts of whatever poetry is available on the Internet, it will receive lots of doggerel and forgettable verse along with some genuinely good poetry. So even the technical skill would be limited, unless someone intentionally scraped only high quality poetry to create a large amount of "good" training data. (Or as the mass of available training data grows to include other AI-generated content, the results could get even worse.) So while the technical skill will likely improve, the actual ideas can only be derivative of the training inputs - there can be no new insights, which is one of the key features of good poetry. If the goal is simply pleasant, measured lines on a given topic, then AI will be able to accomplish a good deal. For mundane greeting cards or run-of-the-mill children's picture books, it will reach a point where it can stand in for what already exists, just as it can already create music that is pleasantly forgettable. But I struggle to see how it could create poetry of lasting value.
It makes me think of this recent article from Plough, explaining how computers are fundamentally limited even in their understanding of math compared to a human mind: https://www.plough.com/en/topics/life/technology/computers-cant-do-math
Chiasms have been on my mind quite a lot over the summer. I know there are murmurings and rumblings about formalist poetry out there; although I respect and encourage the formalist approach, there are simply too many poems in free verse which I've fallen in love with for me to unequivocally throw my lot in with the formalists. The chiastic structure, though, seems a way for poets to write in free verse while also adhering to formalist structures . . thoughts?
I guess I'd say that a lot depends on what you mean by "free verse" and "form." Chiastic structure would be an example of a form (if memory serves me, it's one of the forms John Hollander demonstrates in his handbook, Rhyme's Reason). A poem written according to the rules of that structure would not be free verse, in my view, even if it suggests free verse to the reader whose idea of form runs out at rhyme and meter. There would still be rules, and fairly challenging ones to fulfill in any kind of interesting way, even if the rules didn't entail set metrical or rhyming patterns. I don't know enough about Hebrew poetry, beyond that basic principle of repetition and inversion, to know how it's meant to work metrically, or whether rhyme is a formal principle in that tradition. I really only know it through English Bible translation, which makes me suspect that I have missed a lot.
I've written poems in counted syllabics, taking on rules and patterns from Asian or Welsh forms (and I'll admit that not knowing the languages in which those forms originated means that I probably don't fulfill the demands of the forms all that accurately or well) --- those poems often read like free verse, because they're not strictly metrical, to the ear listening for something like iambic pentameter, and their rhyming patterns often involve internal rather than end rhymes. The forms themselves are pretty intricate and demanding, no less so (and often more so) than the sonnet. The results sound kind of free-verse-like. But they're definitely not free-verse poems.
I think, too, reflecting on many poems that I have admired, that if a poem is good, even if it appears not to have followed any of the standard, expected, obvious rules, often a careful reading will reveal some evidence of formal pressure, however idiosyncratic, that the poet has imposed on the writing.
I also recall a comment by Dana Gioia on our first Open Thread post, reminding us that "free verse" as we typically use that term is actually a mistranslation of the French "vers libre," which entailed unmetered but rhyming lines --- one formal restraint loosened, but definitely not a total absence of traditional rules. This recollection is now sending me down a T.S. Eliot rabbit hole, to his essay "Reflections on Vers Libre," published the same year as Prufrock and Other Observations: https://theworld.com/~raparker/exploring/tseliot/works/essays/reflections_on_vers_libre.html
You asked for thoughts . . . these are some thoughts. :)
I was indeed thinking of the popular conception of "free verse" which equates it with unrhymed and unmetrical poetry (Billy Collins or Masters' "Spoon River Anthology" come to mind right away). Of course, as you rightly mention, even those poets probably have some kind of formal structure going on in their work — maybe at the level of line and stanza instead of syllable and meter, but it would still be a form.
My conception of Hebrew poetry comes mostly from Robert Alter's book "The Art of Biblical Poetry," where he maintains that Hebrew verse is usually arranged in couplets of two or three stresses per line — which is, obviously, not encountered in the English translations (at least, not in the translations I've read).
Thanks for your thoughts — they are appreciated!
If you’d like an interesting attempt to get at the formal elements of free verse (rather, all poetry including it, or after it), see Robert Hass’s A Little Book on Form.
Oh, right, I haven't read that. I read Charles O. Hartman's Free Verse: A Prosody in grad school, but found it kind of meh (for reasons I can't now remember) --- but I did take at least one prosody class that had the prosody of "free" verse as its focus.
At the time, I was especially interested in all those poets who came of age just after the midcentury --- James Wright, for example --- who had begun in strictly formal verse but had made some move away from it. Wright's Shall We Gather at the River, which I think was his last book (?) particularly showcases his facility for moving in and out of rhyme and meter, and I admire those poems a lot --- at least as much as I admire the early sonnet, "Saint Judas."
And a possibly disconnected thought --- I really like this little bit of Eliot's vers libre essay: "We may therefore formulate as follows: the ghost of some simple metre should lurk behind the arras in even the 'freest' verse; to advance menacingly as we doze, and withdraw as we rouse. Or, freedom is only truly freedom when it appears against the background of an artificial limitation." He also notes that "there is no escape from metre; there is only mastery." And I want to say that that's right --- the best writers of what we think of as "free" verse are writers who have mastered meter, or at least have their inner ears sharply tuned to it on an instinctive level (because they've read well), and are not mastered by their lack of facility for it.
Yes, now that you mention it --- I haven't read that Robert Alter book, but I thought I'd heard somewhere that there was actually a metrical pattern in Hebrew poetry, and I'm sure it was discussions of that book that tipped me off. I took a course in Hebrew poetry, actually, in one phase of grad school, but in the entirety of the course, I don't think meter came up at all --- though after 35 years, my memory of the class is pretty hazy!
And I think about poets influenced by the cadences of, at least, biblical poetry in English translation --- Walt Whitman, often cited as a father of American free verse, especially. For all their sprawl, those poems often have a lot going on formally and really aren't nearly as "tennis without a net" as we might initially think they are.
Michael O'Connor's Hebrew Verse Structure, and Alonso Schokel's A Manual of Hebrew Poetics are both very good accounts of Hebrew versification (O'Connor is more complicated, but I am assured is the better account). It is based on the number of stresses per section with some variation, not unlike Winters' account of free verse. The Grail translation of the psalms is the only one I know in English that tries to replicate it.
Thanks for those suggestions! And I didn't know that about the Grail Psalms, though now that you mention it, that makes sense. Just looking randomly at Psalm 147 in Christian Prayer (don't have the whole breviary set), and I can see how regularly trimeter it is, a thing I know I've been hearing all along, in all the psalms of the Liturgy of the Hours, but didn't know why.
I admit that I'm beguiled by Eliot's essay on vers libre, especially the closing line: . ". . . and we conclude that the division between Conservative Verse and vers libre does not exist, for there is only good verse, bad verse, and chaos."
In terms of my current reading, I just finished a wonderful WWII historical fiction book: Lisette's List by Susan Vreeland. It is set in rural France from a period of just before the war to a year or so after and uses art as part of the driver of the plot. The war becomes part of the setting rather than the focus as the story explores the way that displaced Parisian Lisette finds a way to live a life she didn't expect. It was very, very good.
I'm almost finished with the audio version of The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker and narrated by George Guidall. This too, I find to be an excellent book. The narration is fantastic and although it is over 19 hours long it has never seemed that way. This is one that I will likely seek out the book version and read it properly at some point. The book explores many interesting themes in the course of charting the story of the two main characters, who are exactly what the title says: a golem and a jinni. Both are displaced in late 1800's (I think) New York city amoung the immigrant communities.
The last book I'm reading right now is The Disappearing Spoon by Sam Kean. It is a non-fiction book focused on the periodic table of the elements, mostly in the form of anecdotal stories about the elements themselves and their chemistry. I am not very far in, but thus far I am finding it a bit dry. It is very heavy on the chemistry, and I suppose it is nice to discover that I have not forgotten all of my work in college, but I'm not finding the anecdotes particularly interesting. This is one I will likely give up on before I finish. But then, as I explore genres this year, I am finding that I don't particularly enjoy non-fiction for my leisure reading unless I am reading it for a specific purpose.
I want to read Lisette’s List!
I very much enjoyed The Golem and the Jinni. I loved the way it's simultaneously fantasy and historical fiction about the immigrant experience in New York. I read an interview with the author which said she was trying to write straight historical fiction and it wasn't really working. Then someone suggested that as fantasy was what she enjoyed reading, maybe she should try writing that instead. And then some alchemy happened and the two fused.
I rather liked The Disappearing Spoon when I read it with my high schooler last year. Some of it was dry, but compared to other nonfiction we found it quite entertaining and educational.
Lisette's List sounds quite intriguing. I might have to look it up.
My husband has a poetry friend at work; they have been sending each other silly AI poems for more than a year now, I think. They don't get too specific about the form since neither of them has any formal poetry experience. The poems always end up silly and trite, although they do manage to get a bit of a greeting card flavor if the prompt includes emotional content. Occasionally, my husband will get quite silly and send replies to his boss in AI poetry.
I really don't think that AI poetry is in any danger of replacing an inspired poet ever. AI cannot feel, cannot truly express emotion in the way that a good poet does. It cannot use unique and inspired metaphor. Dear hubby says that there might be value in AI poetry because it allows for an exploration of poetry enough that a non-poetical (his word, not mine) person might come to an appreciation for 'real' poetry. Personally, I would say that the poems and analysis you do here have done more for my appreciation than I expect any AI could ever do.
AI doing language reminds me above all of one of those silly shows, Ghost Hunters or suchlike. One of the devices they use to wow the gullible records white noise and then boosts the signal, filters it in braindead fashion, and continues, basically amplifying certain peaks in the initial noise into distinct bands. Sometimes these bands are similar to vowel formants (the resonance peaks of the vocal tract, the three lowest of which encode vowels) with noisier portions around them close enough to consonant noise to be heard as consonants, and then the listeners project voice onto them in a folie à foule of apophenia. (Plus sometimes, I was amused to read, these devices also record radio signals reflected off meteorites, which is infinitely cooler than anything on those shows.) This is the sort of stuff I played with on my own in the phonetics lab late at night in grad school, so I know from apophenia. Humans create patterns; AI sometimes discerns those patterns. More than that, AI is getting better and better at discerning patterns. It does not, however, do anything but process patterns. If it does produce something readable as good poetry it will be random luck combined with the use of patterns that to humans have meaning; to AI it's just a mechanical product of patterns given to it rather than patterns it creates, as humans do.
(More than that, AI language tools are good for strictly regimented language use--it's very useful for populating forms with necessary data. AI "art" is entertaining especially for parodic uses, especially if a particular artist's style is specified--Star Wars as filmed by Tarkovsky, as one example, or alien spaceports as painted by Edward Hopper, to give two genuine examples I really enjoyed--or if cats are involved. It's a tool and should only be judged as a tool, and in law, IMHO, it fits into copyright in the same way any tool does--does it infringe copyright? Then too bad, that use is off-limits. I have read far too many AI enthusiasts who elide the difference between the creative use of pre-existing material and its mechanical use for me to take their philosophical acumen seriously.)
As for reading, I've finally gotten a flood of editing work after a summer drought, so I've done little reading for pleasure besides finishing up three of the books I mentioned reading earlier, with two exceptions. (1) I've gotten through most of the stories in Elizabeth Bowen's Encounters, which are very good, and (2) I have read about the first quarter of Michael Seth's Concise History of Pre-Modern Korea. It's the best I've read in English--there are many good Korean works translated into English, but they assume more familiarity with the country and background knowledge than a foreign reader is likely to have starting out, and it's also fairly up-to-date on recent scholarship. My impression is that it also has a solid treatment of the ideological underpinnings of the different Korean historiographical traditions, which is something you need to beware of when studying Korean history
Though you competently verbalize on carp,
Your wit, my goodly Bot, is not so sharp.
Your similies banal, your syntax woeb'gone—
You pain me, Sir, like some electric Vogon.
I’m beginning the third draft of my memoir of my father (around 68K words at the moment). My mom’s family reunion in early August inspired the writing of a poem on family Sundays when I was a kid. My mother’s mother and my father’s parents ran country stores about a mile apart, so we were able to visit both sides of the family every Sunday, including many of my aunts and uncles and their children.
As to reading, I’m slowly getting through “Spending the Winter” by our own Joseph Bottum, Auden’s “The Shield of Achilles” (the recently published critical edition), and Jason Guriel’s verse novel, “Forgotten Work.” These lines of Guriel, though full of pathos, made me laugh aloud: “Having peaked at metrical expression / In his youth, and stranded on Parnassus, / Daryl Hine could only watch as asses / Like Allen Ginsberg stormed the world below, / While Hine, basecamped with gods, acquired snow.” All three books are well worth the time.
Finally, I’m preparing to build my second modest wall of field stone. The walls are like my poems—they have no purpose but themselves.
The most interesting machine-written poems I've come across were produced sometime before 2016. A fellow poet fed thousands of lines of Whitman into a neural net (his term) and asked it (how, I don't know) to write a poem. It produced lines that he then edited. I never saw the original lines, but his edited versions were odd and moving.
I do think that eventually AI will be able to write high quality poetry. That if it were submitted somewhere anonymously the editor might not know it was created by a computer. I’m not sure what the ramifications of this will be, but I think it places an onus on us human poets and writers to continue to work hard and take our work very seriously lest it become trivial because everyone is “doing” it.
As to the rest, I am still continuing with the Collected Poetry of EAR, and just finished Isaac and Archibald, and occasionally dipping into the English renaissance poets, mainly Jonson. And I am trying to write a poem on Sarah.