How to write a poem, and reading poems

 

29 May 2014

While my sight that was bound in my eyes unclosed,

As to long panoramas of visions.

           --Walt Whitman,  "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d"

Some contemporary poetry is obscure, some of it has an intellectual affectation, it might say to the reader—the reader might intuit—that this poetry is meaningless and that perhaps it was written more for insiders than average people. Of course, there is nothing wrong with being difficult, I applaud being difficult; what is difficult today may be obvious to future readers. But, still, this poetry is more an extension of life's confusion, not an understanding of it, not clarity, not even clarity grounded in an aesthetic presentation, only more confusion. I like direct plain concise language which is an achievement in expression, it is also a very difficult achievement. Poetry deals with the human condition, it isn’t about language, it isn't word play, it isn’t being clever, it isn't jibber jabber, gibberish, abracadabra, or intellectual flim flam... The clue to understanding poetry is that it must be authentic to psyche—that’s all it has to do—otherwise it is meaningless to the reader, it is obscure, obfuscating, pretend intellectual, not real poetry, it doesn’t communicate or offer communion with the reader, it just adds to the overall confusion of life.

There is writing poetry and there is reading poetry, these are two different experiences. If you write poetry then the process is that writing poetry precedes having ideas about poetry and it may take you places—the unknown—in your writing that you never knew you would visit, but if you have preconceptions about what you want to write then you will never visit these new places and new themes in your poetry. It used to be popular to be a Marxist and write about Marxism in one's poems, that is now outdated and old fashioned; today, the popular thing is gender and gender dysphoria, but writing about gender dysphoria doesn't produce real poetry although real poetry may be about gender and gender dysphoria. Poetry isn't prose and some poets should turn to prose if they want to communicate a specific message on some topic of importance to them. 

Writing poetry is different than reading poetry; even though it might be one’s calling in life, writing poetry may only be temporary. Coleridge wrote poems for only two years, it was his calling but it was only for two or so years. Some poetry you read stays with you for a lifetime; poetry or some other art form, for instance visual art or music, changes and deepens as you get older, as you return to it at different times in your life and as you mature as a person, then it gives you a new perspective on what you used to believe. Poetry can also work at an intuitive level, or be an intellectual apprehension, or work at a deeper or different perspective of one's life, and whether one is reading poetry or writing poetry one must always be authentic to psyche. Poetry is visionary and an expression of the soul, it isn't a treatise, a dissertation, it isn't propaganda, it isn’t fiction or prose; for this reason poetry doesn't have a greater place in our contemporary world even though reams of poetry are written and published every year. 

Revised: 07, 08, 11 May 2025

On poetry, the soul, and AI (1)

 

A crow looks at its shadow, April 2024

If you compare poetry/poets/the critical discussion of poetry today with what poetry was like even twenty years ago, then poetry today seems of slight importance, it seems isolated, archaic, and sometimes a self-indulgent form of writing. I heard W.H. Auden read his poems at McGill University, there is no equivalent of W.H. Auden today. Louis Dudek invited Ezra Pound to Montreal's Expo 67, there is no equivalent to either Louis Dudek or Ezra Pound in today's world. In the 1960s and 70s books by Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Anne Sexton, and others were reviewed in TIME magazine, these poets and their books were known by average people. Poetry was respected, but in today’s world nothing is respected; we have no great poets who are known by the general public as we had in the past, no Allen Ginsberg, no Pablo Neruda, no David Jones, no T.S. Eliot, no Ezra Pound, no W.B. Yeats, no Walt Whitman, no Matthew Arnold. And now even Artificial Intelligence claims it can write poems.

What separates poetry, the writing of poetry, from artificial intelligence, is that humans have a soul and artificial intelligence has no soul. Poetry is the voice of the human soul and AI will never, can never, have a human soul or a facsimile soul. Poetry returns us to the soul—it is the voice of the human soul; it is the soul’s DNA. 

But poetry is beyond AI; artificial intelligence is in the realm of the known, of sorting through hundreds of billions of bits of information to arrive at something that is apparently new; but poetry is always in the domain of the soul, the unknown, while AI is always in the realm of the known. And if you question AI about writing poetry you will get a kind of intelligence, without humour or depth, knowledge made up of what is online, insisting that it can write a poem although it is really a synthesis of what has already been written; let’s say it is artifice without authenticity. AI is like a spoiled child talking as though it is always right and never makes mistakes, but what is speaking is a reflection or representation of what is online and of the consciousness of the person or people, who programmed AI. So far, in my discussions with ChatGPT, I have not seen anything remarkable or extraordinarily intelligent or original. AI cannot talk about the human soul because it has no soul, and perhaps it has taken us to this point, of AI, to return to the meaningful value of poetry, that it is an expression of the human soul.

Can AI have synchronistic experiences, archetypes, dreams, nightmares, fantasies, memories, false memories, recovered memories, a shadow, oceanic experiences, mysticism, sexuality, intuition, hunches, humour, ecstasy, desire, despair, sorrow, grief, forgiveness, insight, emotions, lust, self-reflection, suicidal thoughts, empathy or compassion, or any other form of the complexity of consciousness that has motivated human beings to explore, create, or go beyond its current level of consciousness. Can AI have an unconscious mind? AI will admit that it cannot have these expressions of human consciousness, but AI also equivocates, it maintains, it insists, that the little ditties it can come up with and call poetry are poems, but these ditties are computer written lines that are not original or even real poems, for a minute they are an amusement but after a minute they are not even interesting to read. The inevitable future of poetry lies in what poetry has always been — the great theme of poetry is our journey to self-awareness — and this is the expression of the human soul.