Hearing you cry twice
I thought of rats and mice.
You live in my heart
Inspiring my art.
In Shakespeare’s Macbeth
Your cry portended death.
When I hear your cry
I know I too must die.
But perhaps you and I
Will find in rhyme a kind
Of immortality –
Though, in the graveyard plot
It matters not.
As those of you who follow my blog will know, I have been experimenting with Google Bard. This morning I asked Bard whether AI poetry will replace human generated poetry and received a response which can be accessed here, https://g.co/bard/share/074f2caef001
The final few sentences of the AI generated essay sum up Bard’s response:
“Ultimately, the future of poetry will likely be a collaboration between humans and machines. Human poets will continue to bring their unique creativity and emotional insight to the craft, while AI will provide new tools and techniques to help them express their ideas. Together, humans and AI can create poetry that is even more beautiful and meaningful than anything that has been created before.”
Whilst I am sure that many humans will use AI tools with increasing frequency in their writing (including poetry), I am not convinced that this will lead to the composition of poetry even more beautiful than that hitherto created. As the AI response acknowledges, AI lacks human experience. Consequently, unless AI is able to fully comprehend human experience in the same manner as we humans do, it will never be able to surpass Shakespeare, Tennyson or any other of the poetic greats.
Furthermore, the appreciation of any art form is to some extent a matter of subjective judgement. To take a concrete example, I believe that Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night” is a wonderfully powerful poem, whilst a dear friend of mine (who is also a lover of poetry), is left cold by Thomas’s work. There will therefore no doubt be readers who will praise AI generated poetry and poems created in collaboration with AI tools, but others will be left cold by such creations.
The creation of mass produced pottery has not killed the craftsman who produces beautiful pots using his potter’s wheel. Nor, in my view will AI poetry destroy the poet who continues to write from the heart rather than utilising tools such as Google Bard or Open AI’s Chat GPT.
As always I would welcome your comments.
I dreamed of you last night
And by the morning’s dim light
I listened to the rain
And thought of Lady Macbeth
Whose Heart
Shakespeare’s art
Made clean
In death.
When my friend whose name is Claire
Said, “sleep knits up the ravelled sleeve of care”,
I opened my eyes with a start
And said, “bless my poor heart,
I was almost asleep there Claire!”.
There once was a ghost called Banquo
Who, having nowhere particular to go
Frightened poor Macbeth
Half to death
As all lovers of Shakespeare know.
In June 2017, I wrote a post entitled “Its My Blog and I’ll Swear If I Like”, https://newauthoronline.com/2017/06/27/its-my-blog-and-ill-swear-if-i-like/. In that article I argued that everyone has a right to run their blogs as they wish, including utilising swear words in posts. I also stated that swearing has a place in literature, for instance a gangster novel in which none of the characters swear would be wholly unbelievable.
I am, as pointed out in the above piece, no plaster saint myself and will on occasions swear in my personal life. However this is a rarity and when I swear it is, almost always under my breath and its not something of which I am proud.
I was reminded of my 2017 post by this article on the blog of the poet Giles L. Turnbull, http://gilesturnbullpoet.com/2018/04/01/i-swear-that-be-poetry/, in which he discusses the use of swearing in poetry. The article makes for interesting reading but utilises several four letter words, consequently anyone who would find this offensive may wish to avoid clicking on the above link.
As Giles points out, Shakespeare and Larkin (amongst others) employ swear words, for example Larkin’s “This Be The Verse” is famous (infamous)? For beginning with “They f . . k you up your mum and dad, they may not mean to, but they do”, and (in the case of Philip Larkin) the use of the “f” word is wholly justified (there would not be a meaningful poem where he to have written “they mess you up your mum and dad”. However I remain of the view that the sprinkling of poetry (or any other writing) with expletives for no reason other than shock value serves no useful purpose and I personally find such utilisation offensive.
Kevin
“I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious, with more offences at my beck than I have thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in. What should such fellows as I do crawling between earth and heaven? We are arrant knaves, all. Believe none of us”.
(“Hamlet”, Act 3, Scene 1).
I find
That scorpions of the mind
Run rampant in sleep.
To keep
Them at bay
I shall away
And write.
They caper
On paper.
But the thing
Is they will
Return to sting
And bite.
At night.
Therefore To still
The thing that would kill
I must write.
—
“Oh, full of scorpions is my mind, dear wife!
Thou know’st that Banquo, and his Fleance, lives”.
Macbeth: Act 3, scene 2.
Shall I write
To delight
My reader’s a stream of consciousness piece?
Or should I cease
My screed?
For there is no need
To take up their valuable time
With my rhyme
Which goes,
As the river flows
Down to the sea.
I am lost in the ocean
My words a mere commotion
Which (as the bard now dead
So rightly said)
Is “a tale told by an idiot signifying nothing”.
“Macbeth”, or should I say
“The Scottish Play”
Is full of words cleverly stitched together,
With witches and stormy weather
Playing their part.
The dagger in Duncan’s heart
Brought Macbeth and his wife to perdition.
Ambition
Brought him low
As those who study Shakespeare know.
Should I go
On with this rhyme
Wasting time
Forever spinning
To keep my mind off sinning,
Which, of course I never do,
For you
Are aware
I dare
Say
That I am honest as the day
Is long. In fact a plaster saint am I
And when I die
I shall to heaven go,
Or perhaps somewhere below
Where all my desire
Shall end in fire …!
“If there be such a thing
As false memory,
Why then does recollection sting
As a demented wasp?
The physical pain
May go, but the buzz
Does remain,
Churning,
Returning
Again and again.
The lunatics have taken over the asylum
But who are the lunatics and who are the sane?
And why in the brain
Does the imaginary sting
Remain?
The plays the thing
Wherein we’ll catch the conscience of the king”.
“But Claudius is long since dead
And Hamlet is mad”,
The doctor said.
K Morris - Poet 