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Category: Poetry

Poems, thoughts about poetry and links to places that have published my poems

AI-Generated Poetry Responses

Like a lot of English teachers, I find myself having to contend with AI and its impact on student writing. We’ve always dealt with plagiarism such as the good ol’ copying-passages-from-books and the more recent copying-and-pasting-from-the-web, but what generative AI produces is even harder to come to terms with.

I often have my students write a quick 1-paragraph response to what they read. It allows for a quick assessment for me and a memory tool for them as well as possibly the basis of a longer composition. I got to wondering how well ChatGPT could handle this assignment. We had recently read and viewed “Knock Knock” by Daniel Beaty, so I figured I’d start there. First off, here’s Beaty performing the poem.

I gave ChatGPT the following prompt: “Write a response to the poem “Knock Knock” by Daniel Beaty” and got this:

The poem “Knock Knock” by Daniel Beaty is a powerful and emotional reflection on the impact of mass incarceration and absent fathers on Black children. Through the metaphor of a knock on the door that never comes, the speaker conveys the deep longing for a father’s presence and guidance, highlighting the pain of abandonment and the systemic barriers that contribute to such absences. However, the poem ultimately transforms this sorrow into resilience, as the speaker learns to find strength within himself, carrying forward his father’s wisdom despite his absence. Beaty’s spoken-word style and raw emotion make “Knock Knock” a moving tribute to the endurance of love and the power of self-determination.

While the content is disturbingly spot-on, the writing gives itself away. Anyone who’s been teaching English a while quickly gets to where we can identify student writing. This would set off my plagiarism alarm because it’s too perfect. Too high-level. And most significant, and telling of AI, is the lack of affect, the voicelessness that’s reminiscent of corporate mission statements and HR policy documents.

So, I gave it the command “Rewrite it like a 10th grader” and got the following:

The poem “Knock Knock” by Daniel Beaty is a heartfelt piece about a boy missing his father, who is no longer there. Using the image of a knock on the door that never comes, the poem shows the pain of growing up without a dad and the struggles that come with it. It also touches on bigger issues like incarceration and how it affects families. Despite the sadness, the poem has a message of hope, showing that even without his father, the boy can find strength within himself. Beaty’s words are emotional and inspiring, making “Knock Knock” a powerful poem about loss, love, and resilience.

Better but still a little too perfect. Most adults can’t put together a flawless paragraph without some checking over and most kids aren’t that adept at it or willing to do it. Especially for something that’s just a quick assessment.

Next, I tried “Rewrite it but include a run-on sentence, 2 typos, a commonly misspelled word and a punctuation error” and got this:

The poem “Knock Knock” by Daniel Beaty is a deep and emotional poem about a boy who misses his father who is gone and he waits for a knock on the door that never comes showing how painful it is to grow up without a dad and how hard life can be without that guidance. It also talks about bigger problems like incarseration and how it effects families. Despite the sadness the poem gives hope, showing that even though his father isn’t there, the boy can still find strenght in himself. Beaty’s words are powerful and inspiring making “Knock Knock” a touching poem about loss, love and resilience.

Better (or worse depending on how you look at it) but still missing that personal touch. Students often want to personalize their responses, and they should. Here’s my final request, “Add 2 sentences about why you liked it”:

The poem “Knock Knock” by Daniel Beaty is a deep and emotional poem about a boy who misses his father who is gone and he waits for a knock on the door that never comes showing how painful it is to grow up without a dad and how hard life can be without that guidance. It also talks about bigger problems like incarseration and how it effects families. Despite the sadness the poem gives hope, showing that even though his father isn’t there, the boy can still find strenght in himself. Beaty’s words are powerful and inspiring making “Knock Knock” a touching poem about loss, love and resilience. I really like how the poem mixes personal pain with a bigger message, making it relatable and emotional. The way Beaty writes makes you feel the sadness but also the hope, which is what makes the poem so powerful.

And that, my friends, is something I would accept without a single blip from my did-you-really-write-this-yourself spidey sense.

You can speed this up by putting it all together too. Let’s try another one. How about “Dreams” by Langston Hughes. “Write a 1-paragraph response to Langston Hugh’s “Dreams”. Include 2 sentences about why you liked it. Write it like a 10th grader with a run-on sentence, 2 typos, a commonly misspelled word and a punctuation error.” And here’s the response:

Langston Hughes’ poem Dreams is really inspiering because it shows how important it is to hold onto your dreams no matter what, I liked it because it uses simple words but has a deep meaning that makes you think about life and what happens if you give up, the way he compares life without dreams to a “broken-winged bird” is really powerful and makes you feel how empty and sad life would be without goals or hope. Also, I liked how short it was but still made a big impact, some poems are too long and hard to understand but this one was straight to the point and easy to relate to. If people dont have dreams, then theres nothing to look forward to and life just feels stuck, so this poem is a good reminder to keep going.

Our hypothetical student could introduce 5 typos and no end punctuation (“I was up too late last night”) or make it perfect (“I really worked hard on this one”).

I’m fortunate in this regard that I teach 100% at-risk youth in a treatment facility, and so we can control and monitor their computer use (and block AI) but I have no idea how teachers in regular schools and colleges deal with this. And I can’t imagine how much AI-generated writing the teachers in the other content areas get and accept since they’re often not as used to reading student writing and knowing what is and isn’t real.

If you’re a teacher, I’d love to hear how you’re dealing with this.

In the meantime file this under another way in which we lose touch with reality and dumb ourselves down. Or maybe how much longer until I can retire? As the kids say, I think we’re cooked.

What Stranger Miracles

My chapbook What Stranger Miracles is now available in print.

First published as a free digital chapbook by White Knuckle Press in 2016, it’s a collection of 10 prose poems of 100 words or less (per White Knuckle Press’s guidelines).

I’m grateful to editors Dale Wisely and Howie Good who gave this book its first readers and designed such a nice online home for it. It also earned a nomination for the Science Fiction Poetry Association’s 2017 Elgin Award.

Marketing copy:

What Stranger Miracles is a chapbook collection of ten short prose poems first published online by White Knuckle Press in 2016.

From the haunting imagery of plastic relics washed ashore to the enigmatic surveyors who silently observe the world’s secrets, each poem within What Stranger Miracles encapsulates a unique universe, blending the mundane with the mysterious and exploring themes of environmentalism, extinction, love, loss, and the enduring connection between humanity and the sea. 

It was a Science Fiction Poetry Association 2017 Elgin Award Nominee.

from What Stranger Miracles:

THROWN TO SEA (I)

The ocean spits out plastic: faded, thin, but whole. The great-grandchildren of those who threw it in retrieve the relics, invent stories and religions for their ancestors, singing their praises only to go home and complain bitterly that they didn’t leave behind something more useful than just the cast off detritus of their lives. Not even a boat to get off this rock. They are prisoners. The sea is the law.

You can order What Stranger Miracles on Amazon.

Crows

At some point walking down the same trail that’s so familiar but still capable of surprise, I realize I can count life in decades now, neatly dividing events into personal eras. The path descends to a tree where I turn for a loop along the creek that tomorrow will find the river.

a certain slant of flight
in the bleak December sky—
crows heading home

///

(allusive haiku)

routine

do you see the contrail gash
how it tears the sky?

apply direct pressure
at night we’re statues, arms
upraised

night bleeds in from the east
count the tourniquet stars

so slow we dream
like poisoned trees

in the morning I take
the same little walk I always do

Here Comes a Twister & Thoughts about Prose Poetry

She grew up in the land of twisters, seeking shelter in middle bathrooms. She baptized herself in the rivers of glass sparkling through the broken house. Wall clouds turned and blackened, the sky decayed, fell down from itself. Monsters ate trees in the night but by morning, birds always returned, the feeders full of color and song, while all around hailstones melted. Only small questions remained, then; the big ones were all torn up with the trees and trails, apologies she used to believe she owed. A familiar man in coveralls claims he can repair the roof faster, cheaper, better than the other guys who don’t understand these things (sign here please). Her fists clench, knuckles ache like love; she relaxes only when he leaves. She whispers secrets to her daughter: about the days of electricity and engines, about the thrill of kneeling wild-eyed before the weather radio’s robot voice, about prayers for thunder and wind, about how she learned to control storms and how everything that happens flashes in a dark and roaring instant.

///

This an old one, posted here a few years back and later published at CSHS, but it was originally published as a poem—the kind with line breaks—and not as a prose poem or a flash or whatever the heck these rectangular things are. I’ve found the past few years that I want to write more and more prose poetry and then wondering about the distinction between prose poetry and flash fiction.

They (as in the all-knowing They) say flash has narrative and prose poetry relies on imagery and ideas. What then of narrative prose poems, which is how a lot of mine feel to me? Further complicating matters is the fact that many of my poems are drafted in a sort of rambling stream-of-consciousness paragraph form which I then start fiddling with by inserting line breaks. What happens then when I take away those line breaks and go back to prose as in the above poem and in several of the poems in What Stranger Miracles, which was published by White Knuckle Press in 2016 as a free online chap.

I suppose the flow chart would go like this:

stream-of-consciousness draft paragraph without much punctuation – > add punctuation, line breaks, cut stuff -> fiddle w/language, tinker, play -> refine, add and delete lines -> multiple side trips through limbo, some lasting months or even years -> complete poem -> remove line breaks and go back to paragraph form

That all seems very convoluted, but something interesting happens in that step between finished poem-with-line-breaks and prose poem that I don’t think I could have gotten to if I had just kept it in paragraph form from the beginning. I think differently about what I’m writing when those line breaks appear.

Maybe then this is more about a reader’s perception than a writer’s intention. I keep thinking about how musicians remix their own work often releasing it in multiple forms. Any given song might have the studio version, the acoustic version, the club mix, and the live version. Each of these requires changes to the original arrangement while the words (usually) remain the same. The listener is able in many cases to choose and purchase the preferred version.

I realize I’m sneaking back into my thoughts about sanctity-of-text that I was writing about recently, but why not something similar with poetry? Why not release prose versions of our work? Even if in abbreviated format like an EP of a few acoustic tracks from various albums. Prose poetry versions might even go over better in e-book format since they’re easier to code and read on an e-reader.

After reading The Teeth of the Comb & Other Stories by Osama Allomar, a collection described as short stories but often straddling that thin line between flash and prose poetry, I can’t help but wonder if this is this all just marketing stuff. Would prose poetry sell better than poetry if we just called it flash or something more generic like short prose? What about poems remixed into prose form? What are those if they were narrative to begin with? And, back to digital questions, would they sell better as ebooks than poetry seems to?

This comes up because I’ve been going back and prose-ifying some of my old poems. I find some of them work better this way. (I wish there was a WordPress plugin that would do this for me.) As I do this, I’m starting to see the outlines of a manuscript that I hadn’t recognized before. There are a number of these poems-becoming-prose-poems that seem to fit together and for me anyway seem to be more interesting in prose.

I’ll close for now with my author’s statement from the beginning of What Stranger Miracles. Here’s “Adseg”:

Just as they separate ax murderers from regular ones, holding them out for special derision and lengthier sentences, we segregate prose poems from regular poems. They get their own labels and cells, a metal toilet, gang signs, and four hashmarks—one for each consecutive sentence—carved into the crumbling walls on some prison island surrounded by and so far from the sea. The prose poem wakes with the others but hesitates when they roll the doors. It knows it shouldn’t enter the yard with the other poems, those sad misdemeanors that just got busted that one time they tried something big.

Has anyone else tried fiddling with their work like this? Did you like the results? What do you think about releasing multiple versions of your work?

all roads lead here & Notes on Adapting Poetry

 

Lately, I’ve gotten back into making videos. This is my fourth in the past month. This one is from a sequence of three related haiku from Highway Sky called “all roads lead here,” a series of LA-related poems.

Since the “poem” is sort of three poems, I wanted the video to have three parts, and I choose footage that I felt would complement the parts, which in essence tell a story of driving to LA in the middle of the night with the intention of watching the sun set on the beach. If you travel to LA from Texas, you’ll probably come in on I-10 which turns into the Santa Monica Freeway and kind of ends at the Santa Monica Pier. So I wanted footage that followed that trajectory. The footage came from Videvo.net, and I was fortunate to find the LA shot and the Santa Monica beach shots with the others shot who-knows-where.

Things got interesting as I was editing. The more I looked at it, I realized I could cut a line from the first haiku which originally read (as published at tinywords):

a hundred miles out
the glow of Los Angeles
desert starlight

The second line seemed redundant with the footage of the LA skyline and city lights. Likewise, I was able to cut the first line from the third haiku as the sunset-over-the-waves image did the work of the first line.

the sun falls to sea
here at the end of the road
nothing left to say

The central haiku was left alone, but I played with the text to try to put it in motion and show the action of the waves erasing the name.

For the sound, I originally imagined some reverb-soaked surf music. I tried something on my guitar and looked for CC music online, but didn’t find anything. On a lark, I tried some wave sounds and liked how it sounded like highway noise while the cars were on screen, but sounded like waves once the beach shot comes in. Interesting how the image can affect what we think we’re hearing.

I liked this process of adaptation. When movies are adapted from books and stories, filmmakers change things. They fire characters and compress scenes in part to save money on paying actors and renting space, but also because there is often no need to say what is shown. Why not something similar with poetry?

I think writers and probably poets especially can get locked into the sanctity of their words and lord knows there are times when that makes sense, but if poetry is to be a conversation even if as in this case with oneself, I think it’s important to let go a little bit especially when changing mediums. My academic background is in film production and screenwriting where the expectation is that the written word is not final so maybe this comes easier for me, but it’s a comfortable way for me to work and I think it’s useful to see where your words can go and a worthwhile exercise to keep playing with what you’ve made and, if you dare, open it up for others to do so as well.

Starting Up Again

There must be something in the air. For many months, I’ve missed the sense of community in the poetry blogging world that I found when I stumbled onto readwritepoem back in 2009. Like many, I do better as a writer when I feel there are others on the same or similar journeys. I really admired Carolee’s commitment to revitalizing her poetry blogging practice in November, and I’d made a private resolution to do the same here in 2018. Seems there were a lot of us out there thinking along the same lines as I saw on Donna Vorreyer’s blog. So I joined in committing to trying to post something poetry-related here at least once a week.

Blogging made me a better writer, more focused, disciplined and adventurous than anything else other than perhaps grad school, and since I let it start to slide several years ago I have missed it terribly, both the blog and the people I encountered through the community of blogging poets.

I took a four-year detour into the world of editing and while it was such a wonderful experience, I came to miss writing and reading what I wanted to read. Most of my poetry reading the past few years has been the submissions queue for Gnarled Oak, and while I have been blessed to have read so much fine work, I want to get back to reading poetry books and chapbooks–oh, how I miss chapbooks.

In December, I made three new videos, one of which was even featured over at Moving Poems (Thanks, Dave!). I thought a lot about how much I miss this sort of thing. The creating, the sharing, the discovery and growth.

I’ve written very few new poems over the past few years and I’m chomping at the bit to get back to work, so here I am resolving for 2018 to do this. I plan to try to post at least once a week on poetry-related matters, whether draft poems, reviews, commentary or new videos and also, just as important, read and share some of what I find from the other blogging poets whose work I really admire and who are a constant source of inspiration. Thanks for stopping by.

26 January (Videopoem)

 

This is a video I made from “26 January” a poem from Dave Bonta’s excellent Ice Mountain: An Elegy. Dave releases his poetry under a creative commons license, which makes this sort of thing possible. I plan to review the book (and several) others in some future posts–more on that later.

I stumbled on this footage on the ESA/Hubble site while working on Aurora is the effort, and it immediately made me think of Ice Mountain, which I then went back and reread. The ice age reference in the last lines and the fact that “26 January” is one of the more linear poems seemed like a fit for the 1-shot video I imagined.

The footage is an artist’s conception of Pluto, an icy world, apparently lifeless, that resonated for me with the sense of loss and environmental themes that undergird much of Ice Mountain.

For the music, I wanted something that sounded sharp (not musically sharp but sharp as in pointy like icicles) and crystalline with delayed echoes. I decided to try to do the audio myself, so I used my guitar and garage band with some pedal and amp sims that gave me the sound I wanted and then tried to play along with the video I had made. This was my first time trying to score live, and I did multiple takes until I felt it was right. Afterwards, I mixed two of the takes together until it sounded the way I imagined it. I really liked this aspect of it, and plan to do more in the future.

Do check out the other Ice Mountain-related videos on Dave’s site by Marie Craven and Swoon. And thanks to Dave for making his work available like this.

Goddess / Gasolina / For Gasoline

 

This is the video I made for “Goddess” by Cwtch, which is Marie Craven and Paul Foster. “Goddess” is a remix of my poem “For Gasoline” that appears in my book Highway Sky. Paul and Marie remixed it into a song along with a few others on their EP Chasing Headlights. So it is, as Marie described it, a remix of a remix or also to paraphrase her words, a conversation between artists on three continents. I like that.

It’s an odd thing for a poem to move like that from the screen during the mad rush of a napowrimo to the printed page, then to a song, a pair of videos one Spanish and one English by Eduardo Yagüe and Javi Zurrón that have been screened at venues around the world and now full circle (for now) with this music video offered back to Marie and Paul.

 

 

I love this. I love being part of this. I love the idea of the words being set free. We all read and listen to and watch other people’s work and walk away with wildly different ideas. I see this everyday in my classroom. We look at a poem and I am always surprised by what various students take away from it. What if everything were free for us to take that next step and not just think about or talk about what it means to us as individuals but to actually make something new and let it grow?

 

 

I am surprised that “For Gasoline” has traveled so far and in such surprising ways. I am so deeply honored and fortunate to have run into so many wonderful artists who have seen something in this little poem worthy of taking it on new trips.

 

 

“For Gasoline” (and all the poems in Highway Sky and on this site) is licensed under a creative commons by-nc-sa license and is therefore available for remix and interpretation. Feel free to join the conversation.

Aurora is the effort (Videopoem)

 

This is a video I made for Emily Dickinson’s “Aurora is the effort.” I stumbled on the Jupiter aurora footage at ESA/Hubble and wanted to do something with it. I had Dickinson on my mind since we share a birthday, and I often find myself turning to her work around this time of year, so I started searching for aurora-related Dickinson poems and liked this one for its simplicity and unusual syntax and wording. The sounds are radio static and me rubbing the strings and hitting the back of a bass guitar with some effects from garage band.

I’ve been wanting to do a Dickinson poem for years and even have a concept for another one that maybe someday will get done. Thanks for watching.