Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 38, No. 265.
Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
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Date: 2024-12-01 19:46:47+00:00
From: James Rovira <jamesrovira@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 38.263: AI, poetry and readers
Once again, Tim prompts me to respond. My own background includes work in
poetry: half of my dissertation was about a poet, William Blake, and I've
taught both formal and free verse at the undergraduate and graduate levels,
and I've supervised creative theses that were collections of poetry,
besides having published a number of poems myself. That's my background.
I would never argue with Tim that some kind of human intent is always
behind the production of text. Most literary scholarship disregards intent
as inaccessible or irrelevant, however. The fact that a poem, even one
generated by a prompt fed to a computer, is an intentionally made product
usually doesn't help us understand it. If we do enough biographical and
historical research, and if we even know the author and the time and
conditions of the writing of the poem, that will help us understand the
author at the moment of writing the poem, but not what the poem in any
absolute sense *means.* T.S. Eliot's essay "Tradition and the Individual
Talent" is a good reflection on the relationship of poem to author from the
author's point of view:
<https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69400/tradition-and-the-individual-
talent>.
So the meaning of the poem resides in the words on the page, not in the
poet who produced them. As a result, there's no reason why an AI generated
poem can't be subject to the same kind of analysis as a humanly written
poem.
Before I move on, I'd like to define a couple of terms: Formal verse
follows predetermined rhyme and metrical patterns (at least one or the
other, often both) while free verse does not. Free verse may follow such
patterns, but they are invented by the poet for the poem.
What I'm going to say is about formal verse first: I love the invocation of
Lewis Carroll at the end of Tim's post, who was a mathematician. I believe
that background in mathematics contributed to the excellence of his verse.
I frequently compare a line of poetry to a bar of music (and I'm hardly
original in doing so), and the mathematical qualities of a bar of music is
hardly contested. Neither should the mathematical qualities of a line of
formal verse. Many kinds of formal verse forms consist of a fixed pattern
of stressed and unstressed syllables often combined with a fixed rhyme
scheme.
As a result, the tendency, or danger, is for the poetic form to turn the
poet into a computer rather than for the poet to own the form as meaningful
self-expression. As a result, there's no reason that a computer couldn't
produce something that at least fits the pattern, even a conceptual pattern
that requires a certain kind of rhetorical gesture around, say, line 9 of a
sonnet, or the last two lines of an Elizabethan sonnet. As a result,
there's no reason why the computer generated poem couldn't be subject to
analysis *as if* a human being had written it. It is still made up of human
words.
A poem written by a computer as an intentionally devised means of authentic
self expression would probably be in binary, or in electrical impulses, or
some kind of representation of them. If computers really wrote their own
poetry, only a programmer could read it, or an engineer with an amprobe and
a volt meter.
Just to be clear, I do not believe this will ever happen.
HOWEVER, once you begin writing *parodies*, you turn even a free verse
source poem *into a formal verse form*. It suddenly has fixed parameters,
even for specific conceptual moves and rhetorical devices. And above all
else, a good parody is an inherently bad poem imitating a good one, and the
better it is at imitation *while still being a bad poem*, the better a
parody it is. So I think AI is especially suited for writing parody poems.
I only find it sad that it can't laugh along with us.
What we're circling around without discussing, however, is what a poem
fundamentally *is*.
I think that many people believe poetry is a deeply meaningful and symbolic
means of human self-expression.
Every bad human poet who has ever lived thought just that. Douglas Adams
thought just that in a very funny way. Poets who focus on their own
feelings and ascribe inherent worth to them while they are writing their
poems massively suck, both as human beings and as poets.
Whenever poetry rises to meet that criteria, it is only as a by-product.
A poem is nothing other than a bunch of words arranged into lines. If it
looks like a poem, it is a poem. It doesn't matter how it was produced.
That is the hard and cruel truth. Eliot faced that truth; Milton faced it.
The poem doesn't care about the poet. The poem does not express the poet.
The poem expresses itself. The poem *leaves* the poet and then does
whatever it will, and if it's a really good poem, it means a lot more than
the poet ever hoped to express. So good poets really only care about the
words on the page. "Care" is an emotion, and there is probably another
emotion behind that care, but the focus of their attention is on the artful
arrangement of words on a page or screen. If the focus is anywhere else,
the poem is bad.
A poem is not soft and meaningful and of deep feeling. A poem is hard and
cruel and meets you only on its own terms. It does not know you or care
about you. It does not feel: it may provoke feelings, but it *doesn't care
about your feelings*. It simply is. If a poem became sentient, it'd be a
real jerk. So good poets very carefully *construct*, but not *write*,
poems. A poem is a kind of emotional/conceptual program that, once arranged
by a human poet, works outside of its own parameters.
So I disagree with this claim: "But, looking-like a poem is not a
sufficient, nor even a necessary, condition of being a poem."
I think that is the only condition of being a poem. I think I would agree
with Tim's claim if we were describing a *great* poem. I don't think AI can
do that, only because it would need to understand nuance incorporating too
much outside the poem, beyond syntactical patterns.
But most human beings who write poetry actually write bad poetry. Some
write decent poetry, even good poetry. Most will never write great poetry
ever, at all, their entire lives. But if they're lucky, they might write a
few great lines here and there. That makes all the rest of it worth it.
Jim R
On Sun, Dec 1, 2024 at 3:01 AM Humanist <humanist@dhhumanist.org> wrote:
>
> To be clear. It takes a person to decide to present some text
> as a poem, whether they wrote the words, and are thus left
> with the text marks of their words, or got the text generated
> by some gee whiz machine. I bet if the generated text didn't
> look somehow like a "poem" to this person, they wouldn't
> present the text as a "poem." But, looking-like a poem is not
> a sufficient, nor even a necessary, condition of being a poem.
> Trying to make "poems" using text generators thus easily
> results in what I call 'Artificial Flower' "poems" -- texts
> which may look like poems to many people, but ain't poems, not
> real ones -- and, cannot result in things I would call
> 'Artificial Light' poems -- marks that are artificially made
> somehow to be used to recreate words well chosen to form real
> poems, and which may not look like any poems we've seen
> before, but, which, upon genuine analysis and interpretation,
> can be shown to be, and thus appreciated as, real poems,
> perhaps in new and exciting ways.
>
> -- Tim
>
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