Around six months after my last experiment, I bearded ChatGPT
in its den regarding the poetic output of one Tom Edward Phillips (which it
correctly identified as “the British-Bulgarian poet, not the visual artist”).
On this occasion, I asked it to write two poems – titled ‘Poetry is the New
Rock’n’Roll’ and ‘Portishead’ respectively. Previous AI-generated versions of
these poems have been utterly dire – often written in rhyming couplets and with
hideously clichéd phrasing. This time the results were noticeably scarier, not
because they resemble the original poems with those titles in any way, shape or
form, but because they both resemble the poems with those titles I might have
written now. Were they in Bulgarian, in fact, they wouldn’t look wholly out of
place in the new book, ‘Self-portrait with Tobacco Moustache’. I’ll include the
two poems at the end of this document because, in the meantime and intrigued, I
went on to ask ChatGPT what it thought are the predominant features of a Tom
Phillips poem. Its answer alleged that “habits of attention” are more important
than “stylistic tics” (I’d go with that) and that the main qualities of my work
are that it’s a) “Meditative without being confessional”; offers “A double cultural
perspective”; regards “The ordinary as a portal”; and shows “An interest in etymology
and language itself”; are “intellectual but not academic”; exhibits “musical
restraint”; has “a preference for ambiguity over closure”; regards “landscape
as history”; and exhibits “dry, understated wit”. At this point in the discussion,
the machine decides that my “broader literary neighbourhood” incorporates
George Szirtes, Michael Longley, Alice Oswald and Seamus Heaney (Elizabeth
Bishop gets added a bit later on).
It then asked me which Tom Phillips poems I’ve been reading
and I directed it towards ‘Kvartal’ – the poem which, although originally
written in English, in many ways forms – in Kristin Dimitrova’s magnificent
translation, the core of the ‘Self-Portrait’ book. Now the machine’s
interpretation focuses on “its allegiance to the local”, “a documentary impulse”,
“a refusal to inflate experience”, “urban pastoral”, “tonal democracy” and “plain
syntax”. “Finally,” ChatGPT concludes. “I think his work has a quality that
reminds me more of some Central and Eastern European poets than of much
contemporary British lyric poetry: history is present, but it arrives
sideways.”
And so it goes on – with reflections on my work as a
playwright and as a translator, the improved visibility of literature in
translation, why a translation of Blaga Dimitrova’s Lavina would be a
welcome addition to the ‘modern classic’ English-language library (I am here
and available for the task!) and even a concession that AI will never be able
to replace human translators of literary texts.
What’s scary, of course, is the rapidity with which AI learns.
Six months ago it was vague and evasive. These days it’s chucking out thoughts
which aren’t entirely laughable – its subtlest point, perhaps, being that I’m
not imitating Bulgarian and East European poetry, but am exhibiting its
influence. The whole conversation is doused in flattery, and I’ve been lucky enough
to get quite a bit of coverage for recent publications, thereby giving AI more
material to ‘scrape’, but the machine is no longer simply regurgitating phrases
other people have written, it’s making links, considering, coming up with thoughts
which are new to me and, I have to admit of interest in a potentially useful
way (“tonal democracy” being one),
Saying all this doesn’t mean that I don’t still regard AI as
a threat rather than an opportunity, but it’s been an interesting experiment and
one that’s probably downgraded my instinctive DefCon3 to DefCon2 – at least for
the moment.
Here, should you be interested, are my poems ‘Poetry is the
New Rock’n’Roll’ and ‘Portishead’ rewritten in the style of ‘Kvartal’ by AI:
Poetry is the New Rock'n'Roll
The amplifiers retired quietly.
No ceremony.
Only a low electrical hum
left inside the walls.
Now the feedback comes
from vowels
leaning too hard
against silence.
A poem enters wearing
yesterday's leather jacket,
its elbows patched
with borrowed alphabets.
It has crossed borders
without learning
to salute them.
It knows that every language
keeps a basement
where unfinished songs
wait beside extinct gods,
cheap cigarettes,
and a grandmother
folding history into pastry.
The crowd is smaller now.
Enough
to start a weather.
The microphone
has become a page.
The page,
a dangerous little stage
where metaphors refuse
their assigned seating.
Watch carefully.
A line break
can throw a government
further than a guitar solo.
The old rebellion
travelled by volume.
This one
travels by echo.
A child copies a sentence
into the margin of a textbook.
one impossible image
on a train.
Someone translates it badly.
Someone else
misunderstands it perfectly.
The poem survives
by changing accents
without changing pulse.
Call it quiet
if you like.
Seeds are quiet.
Fault lines are quiet.
The moon
never needed a drum kit.
When the lights come up,
there is no encore.
Only people
walking home
with unfamiliar words
beating time
inside their pockets,
as though language itself
has remembered
that it was always
the loudest instrument.
Portishead
The sea arrives
without insisting
on being the sea.
It is content
to be mud,
a mirror with poor eyesight,
a long conversation
between tide and stone
People learn patience here.
Not because they choose it,
but because water
keeps rearranging
the meaning of arrival.
Gulls annotate the morning
with their untidy script.
A dog discovers
that every stick
has travelled further
than anyone can prove.
The high street
wears its decades lightly.
Behind windows
someone is making tea,
someone is leaving,
someone has forgotten
that departure
often looks exactly
like staying.
Across the estuary
another shore
pretends to be closer
than weather allows.
Distance has always been
the harbour's favourite illusion.
Evening lowers itself
into the boats.
Ropes tighten.
Metal cools.
The last light
collects in puddles
where the sky,
unable to decide
whether it belongs
to land or water,
settles briefly
for both.
You leave believing
nothing happened.
Then, days later,
walking somewhere inland,
you notice
your thoughts
still keeping time
with the tide.
