More on AI and poetry

In addition to my earlier post about AI here are some further thoughts and pieces of information

• The latest Acumen magazine has an article by Robert Griffiths. He suggests that programs like Bard may encourage us to think more about how poems get written. For example, can computers produce lines that are unexpected and effective?
• I think AI is best at "Well written, competent" mainstream poetry, hermit-crab forms, and some styles of avant-garde poems (e.g. N+7). Will poets shy away from writing in these styles? How did artists react to the advent of photography? They didn't flee from Realism - photographic accuracy had rarely been their intention. Indeed, the idea of Hyperrealism only appeared decades later.
  Chessplayers have been affected by chess programs. Advancing rook's pawns has become more popular, and knowing that their opponents have prepared using the same computers, they deliberately play sub-optimal moves to thwart the preparations. I can imagine more poets veering toward daring imagery/styles rather than trying to emulate the Masters.
• I sometimes write on autopilot, using much the same techniques as AI. For example, I try to write tidy final lines that allude to more than one earlier detail.
• The UK's ALCS (Authors' Licensing and Collecting Society) surveyed their members about AI. See A Brave New World
• In December the UK government launched a consultation on generative AI and copyright – see Copyright and artificial intelligence
• Several articles last year used a paper from Nature - AI-generated poetry ... - to suggest that people preferred AI-generated poetry to human-generated poetry.

Line-breaks in prose

In Seam 27 many years ago Michael Bayley began his review of Helen Mort's "The Shape of Every Box" poetry pamphlet with

Perhaps one of the more interesting developments in poetry over the last fifty years has been its overlap with short story writing. It's unsurprising that poetic language has relaxed into an easy colloquial manner but maybe what wasn't expected is the way poetry's taken on the subject matter of prose forms. The evolution took a leap with Philip Larkin, but when Douglas Dunn published "Terry Street", a book whose themes leant more to the 50s novel than its poetry, it seemed that poetry had taken a detour down a side road. Only now can we acknowledge this development as part of the mainstream, having witnessed this interest in narrative structures filter through to the work of Andrew Motion and beyond.

I don't know how true it is, even if only UK poetry is considered, but I have read quite a lot of poetry for which this applies. What has changed over the fifty years - poets? the world? readers? the market? Poetry has expanded to accommodate more demotic language. And in the UK, the market for short stories has shrunk while the Flash scene has matured.

Nowadays if a short story writer started writing shorter stories, I don't think that the addition of line-breaks would be an obvious step to take, let alone an inevitable one. Micro prose is viable - Flash exists.

I can see why a narrative poet might cling to line-breaks so that they can continue sending their work to the usual places. Perhaps these writers feel that only by presenting their short pieces as "poetry" will readers approach the text with the appropriate diligence.

But the market is changing. More poetry magazines now accept "poetry/micros". Just as poets discovered that end-rhyme/form wasn't a defining feature, so nowadays we're freed of the obligation to use line-breaks, which doesn't mean we have to write "prose poetry".

But old habits die hard. In the most recent "Under the Radar" magazine, the first piece in the poetry section begins with "The world's population of violinists/ has decreased recently/ and the remaining musicians gather in Vienna./ They decide to create an archive of/ violin tunes.", ending with "The computer has been switched off/ and the bow has stopped moving./ Raindrops stroke the strings/ and the violin makes his own voice.". I like it. I think it would fit comfortably into most Flash magazines nowadays were the line-breaks removed. I can't see what purpose they serve.

Poets writing about their poems

In "Don't ask me what I mean" (Picador, 2003), a collection of articles by poets about their books, Billy Collins wrote "Performing an act of literary criticism on your own work is a little like do-it-yourself dentistry: a sloppy affair at best, not to mention the pain involved for writer and reader alike".

This feeling seems common. Poets, even (especially?) confessional ones, aren't often open about the craft of their poems. Ask them why a poem's stanzas have 6 short lines (rather than 3 longer ones), or ask them which poems wouldn't be in their book were it 10 pages shorter, and see what happens. More daringly, ask them if that middle stanza is really earning its keep, or whether the obscurity is necessary, or whether the self-imposed requirement to make the poem a sonnet really justifies all that padding.

I can understand why poets are defensive - there's little to gain, and some questions of that ilk don't have useful answers - maybe on another day the stanzas might have been 3-lined, maybe the poem wasn't written for people like the questioner. On the other hand, there might be aspects that the poet wants to advertise - perhaps devices are used that aren't obvious on a first reading.

I've seen some poets open up -

• At the end of Best American Poetry (BAP) and Best British Poetry anthologies, poets sometimes write usefully about how their poem ended up the way it did. Often though, they cloud the issue, describing what they've done without convincingly explaining why -
  • 'Shattered Sonnets' that sort of simultaneously distort, discard, and highlight formal, thematic, and rhetorical sonnet conventions (Olena Kalytiak Davis, BAP 2000)
  • I deliberately ended the first four stanzas with '-ing', which is a kind of cheater's rhyme, and the last two with the imperfect rhyme of 'combat' and 'scratch.' I threw in 'protest' and 'trust' near the end, for fun. Between the cheating, the imperfection, and the distance between rhymes, I hope that the poem reads as free verse, yet looks formal because of the tercets. The combination of the free and constrained, of modern and traditional, seemed suited to the subject, writing to and from the canon (Adrienne Su, BAP 2000)
  • The poem was a liberation to write, technically speaking; though it rhymes, the rhyme scheme changes every stanza, and the meter is deliberately clunky (Mary Jo Salter, BAP 2000)
  • Of course, what I intended is irrelevant. I had hoped to play with metaphors for the artist's relationship to a life of service in places of political or natural power. The couplet form seemed intimate ... I had given myself an assignment to count numbers of words per lines, and to make rapid shifts in types of reality (Brenda Hillan, BAP 2000)
  • Once I chose that first line of the poem, the mystery, magic, and music of poetic language took over, and I rode it like a musician rides a melody, or a surfer rides a wave. It was a wonderful experience (Quincy Troupe, BAP 2000)
• Jonathan Edwards often writes informatively about his poems, most interestingly in his article about How to renovate a Morris Minor, taking us through earlier drafts (it's easier to be objective about drafts than about final versions).
• Kona MacPhee wrote an excellent "Companion" booklet for her "Perfect Blue" poetry book, which was online for a while.
• I added a web site for my poetry booklet at litrefsmovingparts.blogspot.com

Depressing statistics

• On their Dec 2021 blog cbeditions reported "As usual, getting the books into bookshops has been head-against-brick-wall. Roy Watkins’ Simple Annals was called ‘a masterpiece’ in the Literary Review and ‘an astonishing achievement’ in the TLS; on Leila Berg’s Flickerbook in the TLS, ‘Reading it is a joy; brutally honest depictions of childhood liberate the child within … This reissue is wholly welcome.’ Sales into bookshops: around 50 copies of each."
• In Becky Tuch's 2024 interview with Wayne Miller, Editor of Copper Nickel, it says that "They receive about 3,000 stories per year and publish about 12; receive about 15,000 poems and publish 50-60; receive about 700 essays and publish 4; receive about 100 translations and publish 6-8". Copper Nickel isn't an especially famous magazine (though it's 11th in a recent list of poetry magazines). The acceptance rate (1 in about 300 for poetry and stories) deters me from trying, and makes me wonder how they manage to find the best work.
• According to Nielsen, the top selling poetry book in the UK this year was "Wild Hope" by Donna Ashworth. She's an Instagram poet, selling a mere 33,472 copies. Homer was 14th, 15th, 18th and 20th. The Neilsen figures don't cover all sales. Depressing all the same.

"the North" (issue 67, January 2022)

"the North" keeps going - about 130 big, square, two-column pages. 136 poems by 78 poets (Philip Gross, Maura Dooley, Graham Mort, Pascale Petit, etc). There are selections from the pamphlet competition winners. There are about 17 reviews, and articles on particular books/poems. As usual there's a "Blind Criticism" article where 2 poets comment on a poem without knowing who the author is.

It's a good read.

• I liked "The Chain Ferry, memory" (Philip Gross)
• I liked "Dutch Masters in Sepia" (Maija Haavisto)
• I didn't get "From Seat E39", "On Balance", or the Jenny King poems
• I liked "Before the frost" by Anthony Wilson
• Helen Evans' "It's fun, if you're a child" is an 16 line specular poem
• I liked "Night Journey" by Jamie Coward, though I would have preferred it as prose.
• I liked "David Hockney's flip-flops" by Tessa Strickland
• River Walton has 6 pages of poems with illustrations. 6 pages too much.
• I liked most of "Rewind" by Anastasia Taylor-Lind
• I liked "Today you went to lunch with a cave" by Sarah Barnsley. Had it begun life as prose, I think it would be considered damaging to quantize it into little chunks.
• Despite the hypey puffs I didn't like any of Helen Seymour's 6 poems.

Several of the articles (and even a few of the reviews) are appreciations - of dead or favourite poets; of single poems or books. I should practice writing these, keeping all reservations at bay.

My Writing Year (2024)

This year I've written 7 poems (none of them very good), 4 stories (2 ok), and 15 Flashes (some of them ok. Maybe 2 good). I've radically revamped 4 old stories - by merging 2 of them I think I've produced 1 printable piece.

I've had a dozen or so acceptances, mostly of old (sometimes very old) stuff.

Because I was long-listed in their competition, I got a story in the Leicester Writes anthology. And Full House nominated a Flash of mine for Best MicroFiction 2025.

And that's about it. I sent 2 booklets off (one poetry, one prose) which got nowhere. This time last year I promised myself that I'd write some proper reviews. I haven't, though I've read (or listened to) about 200 books. The nearest I've got to writing reviews is writing in detail about some short story collections (my favourite type of book, I've realised). Long ago I wrote articles/craftnotes, sometimes many of them in a year. It's a while since I've done that. Maybe next year.

Currently I've 4 stories sent to competitions, 3 stories sent to magazines, 10 flashes with magazines and 10 poems with magazines.

Lessons from academic science publishing

What is the point of periodicals?

• To make work available
• To judge which work to publish (and edit it)
• To archive work
• To record who first had the idea

The Web had changed the speed/density of communications so much that ideas and feedback can be communicated in seconds rather than months. The Web has also encouraged the call for free access to publications.

The small-press literature world I'm interested in has tried to adapt to this changing world. Here are a few observations from the science/medical world, where careers and lives can be at stake.

• Minimal Publishable Unit - If you're being assessed by the quantity of papers you publish, it doesn't make much sense to put 3 good ideas into a paper when each of them could have been the foundation of a paper. So you use "salami slicing" to produce 3 papers.
  I've seen poetry sequences that seem to be thinly spreading ideas to the same end.
• Who pays? - In the old days, papers were printed in paper journals that libraries had to pay a lot of money for. The referees who read the submissions weren't (and usually still aren't?) paid - it was a good thing to mention on CVs. Nowadays journals are usually online-only. Submission is usually free but the publication fee might be thousands of dollars. This model of publication is open to abuse.
  Many literary magazines now charge for submission to fund their free-access publications.
• Pre-prints - Free-access sites exist where drafts can be sent to get comments, and to stake a claim on work. It means that important (perhaps life-saving) findings are quickly available to all. Some grants require that all the resulting papers are public access.
• Paper mills - Some periodicals have lax quality control. People pay to be published in them so that they have a publication they can quote. There are grey areas.