Category: blog

Martyn Crucefix | Can AI Write an Original ‘Poem’ By ‘Me’?

UK blogger Martyn Crucefix discusses his experiments with AI poem creation in his blog post ‘Can AI Write an Original ‘Poem’ By ‘Me’?’

On a personal note, I too (like Martyn) have been fiddling around with AI of late, seeking to create a small picture book as a family gift. It’s set in Spain in 1936 during the Spanish Civil War, & I’d been searching for images of 1930’s vintage trucks … tried google searches of well-known automotive brands for the era, but nothing popped up and figured, maybe AI can do the trick. Which it did, with ease. I’m not fussed it’s an AI generated image, the picture book – if it happens — will be a gift, a bit of fun, paying more attention to the act of gift-giving than to other considerations…. AI has its uses, in my experience.

But it has its downsides too, particularly in attempting to imitate the human – as Crucefix discovers….

Having written this I have convinced myself – even more than I had been before – that what AI has written is a ‘hide’, a cover for a poem, making use of words and ideas that it has found associated with poems (perhaps even my own poems) but which it doesn’t itself ‘get’ (how could it?). On the other side of the desk sits the reader. The question for the reader is: how well do we read any poem that comes before us? Do we accept its (often) feeble gestures towards significance as the real thing? Out of a hundred poems we read in magazines and on-line, how many of them ARE the real thing? I’d bet my AI generated poem would find its way into a UK magazine (eventually). It has the aura of a poem, it has many of the familiar gestures of a poem, it doesn’t really make proper sense (which some think is the mark of a real poem), it doesn’t have the heart of a true poem (but lots of poems I read don’t either because they too are copying, mimicking tropes and phrases from other poems).

Read more.

Postscript … a podcast chat with Jamie Freestone (substack ‘The Stark Way‘) on Sarah Wilson’s site ‘This is precious‘ a couple of days ago is well worth a listen (though I assume it’s behind a paywall), discussing the projected scenario of AI in 2027 being so advanced that (in Freestone’s words), ‘you’ve got this sort of self-improving feedback loop where maybe one [AI] company finds almost to their own surprise that they’ve got something that is now much closer to an artificial general intelligence, or an artificial super intelligence, perhaps. And then you’re worried that it will break free of its constraints or start using deception to do things that you don’t want it to do and it becomes very hard to handle … I think that’s probably the kernel of the AI 2027 scenario….’

PPS not to mention the significant water concerns due to the substantial water requirements of data centres that power AI systems….

 

 

Andrew Blackman – No, RSS isn’t dead!

(from Andrew Blackman’s blog, 7th May 2025)

‘When I mention RSS these days, I often get either a complete lack of recognition or a kind of amused astonishment, as if I’ve just suggested sending them a fax.

It’s true that big tech companies, notably Google, have killed many of the RSS readers and other technology that used to be common ten or more years ago. It’s true that social media basically took over from RSS as a way of getting updates. It’s true that nobody even tracks RSS usage any more, as far as I can see. I’ve done editing work for tech companies that don’t even bother creating RSS feeds for their blogs because they think nobody uses it. But that doesn’t mean RSS is dead.’

More at Andrew Blackman

 

 

Louise Akers | 12 to 20 questions (from rob mclennan’s blog)

(from ‘rob mclennan’s blog’, 17 April 2025)

5 – Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

I love doing readings–because they are fun and social and ephemeral experiences, but also it is a hell of a way to edit a poem. When I know I am reading something out loud in front of strangers, I will be totally ruthless in a way that only vanity can inspire. Also sometimes while I’m reading it, and really hearing and feeling its living reception I will change little things to allow for clarity or rhythm or some other immediate and interpersonal effect.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

Oh, it’s hard not to just quote Walter Benjamin on this one. I think critique is important; I think it is important to register the fact that throwing language at a problem (“problem” standing in here very broadly and clumsily for any of the myriad social-political-environmental-economic cataclysms we are enmeshed in currently), policing the language around a problem, or even diagnosing a problem discursively are all deeply incomplete projects, while also realizing that that is not an excuse or a reason not to do those things. Very clunky sentence, but hopefully you get the drift.

(More at rob mclennan’s blog)

Louise Akers is a poet living in Brooklyn, NY. She is a PhD student in English at NYU and is the co-organizer of the small press and working group, the Organism for Poetic Research. Akers is the author of two books of poetry, Alien Year (Oversound, 2020) and Elizabeth/The story of Drone (Propeller Books, 2022).

Dulcetly (Kristy Bowen): Adventures in self-publishing

(from a post on Kristy Bowen’s blog Dulcetly | notes on a bookish life – 03 March 2025))

I was moving some books around on my shelf and realized I have now published just as many books via self-publishing as I did traditional publishing….

After 2020, I felt a shift in my relationship toward po-biz and publishing, as well as a general backlog and build-up of unpublished work. In those intervening years, I’ve had fairly long routines of writing poems daily (or at least fragments)  By the time 2021 had rolled around,  was sitting on three full-length manuscripts that I genuinely had no idea what to do with. I submitted at least two of them during reading periods for my current press, but nothing was picked up those go-rounds. I am not really a contest person, especially if they have high entrance fees and the idea of finding an forging another relationship with an indie seemed an up-hill climb.  And no one publisher could possibly take on as many books as I had stuffed away in my hard drive.

(More at Dulcetly)

‘See Me’ (referencing Martin Edmond’s blog ‘Isinglass’)

An extract from a post by Martin Edmond who continues to blog of exquisite abstractions:

…. Dylan goes on to sing: ‘Everybody that I talked to had seen us there / Said they didn’t know who I was talking about’ which is kind of apposite to my own attempts to re-visit the past, which tend to dissolve into phantoms and whispers, to two word sentences that no longer mean exactly what they say, that rely upon the intonations of beloved voices, now no longer with us, in order to be understood at all.