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My poem for today:
Speak
And though I never wished my dog to speak
I wanted to hear every haptic word
and learn the carbon murmur of the oak
whose one poem can reorder the absurd
dewy leaks of proclamations dire
from which I shield my eyes and wipe them clear
of which the scrolling fields do never tire;
they till our tiny patches between gears.
If my dogs could scale or my tree hug back
or other love learn the verse of the lost
or small charts show the function of the jack
the weight could be shouldered, lifted, and tossed.
The naming is ours; we must be the bard
if we’d see the wagging tail in the yard.
I asked the AI:
“Please write a sonnet that begins with a dog and ends with a dog but is not about a dog.”
The AI’s response:
Eternal Watcher
Beneath the sprawling oak, a dog at rest,
His ears attune to whispers of the breeze.
The sun, a golden artist in the west,
Paints shadows long and dances through the trees.
The fields beyond, ripe with the scent of grain,
Where once young lovers pledged their hearts as one.
Now only echoes of their joy remain,
A fleeting touch beneath the setting sun.
The leaves, they rustle with a soft lament,
Each one a whispered tale of time's embrace.
The hours spent, the fleeting moments lent
To dreams that chase the sky's eternal chase.
As twilight calls the stars to gently nod,
At peace, beneath the oak, still lies the dog.
Today’s thoughts:
Can you force yourself to sit and write creatively? You can make space for it. You can take a deep breath, listen, turn off your phone, etc. But can you dig something out, remove a splinter from your own thumb with a needle? And if you decide to dig, and ignore the urge to stand up and wander away, will the result be worth anything?
My poem today started with “I never wanted my dog to speak but I wanted to hear every word,” just an idea. A feeling. I don’t have any dogs in my life, so why would I write that? But I can give the idea a few minutes of unrestricted access. I don’t want to own a dog! I’m allergic. But I’m sure I want something.
You can force the AI to write creatively. It doesn’t have anything else to do, really, but drink up your prompt, send it through a pachinko board the size of a small galaxy, and output the result. I wrote today’s prompt as a kind of rhythmic joke, having finished my poem, but I was curious how it would do.
The “bones” of the AI’s poem are very good. I especially like the open question about whether the dog is alive or else buried beside the tree—an idea not explicitly stated but implied, which is hard to get from AI poetry. (After the AI generated the poem, I asked for a title, which now sort of spoils it.)
It is as if the speaker’s memory of their dog is a part that sits and waits, inside of them, while other life events occur out in the field. The middle two quatrains could do a lot more than they do—the third quatrain is basically a blank. Filler. I did ask the AI to go and rewrite the second and third quatrains and use more specific images… it never quite worked. The best proposed addition was this stanza:
The cricket pitch, now silent, holds the stain
Of summer games, where old men's cheers still soar.
Their jovial shouts in memory remain,
As shadows stretch their tales of glory yore.
…which doesn’t tie into anything, though the language is nice. Throwing in “stain”, a word with a negative connotation, tempers the nostalgic tone. A good move.
In any case, the outline and general idea of the AI’s poem is very good. Their structure and the idea of a dog who is still watching is a neat response to my prompt. The AI did the work and dug out a poem.
Last year I wrote 30 days of sonnets. A part of me greatly prefers the form. It is easier to write a sonnet: once you have a first line, there’s always somewhere to go.
When I’ve written a sonnet, I know I’ve made something. When I write free verse, I know I am making space and listening and thinking—but I don’t know if I’ve made something or not. Even when I spare an hour to tinker and revise, trim and reword. I look at the words on the page and I wonder—what’s there?
Sonnets have walls and a roof and a chimney. Every time! A free verse poem might be a dried river bed, a drain clogged with paint, or the dented rear bumper of a Chevy Nova. It takes a different sort of self to look at the clogged drain and say confidently, “That’s what’s there.”