Why poetry counts
Another year, another National Poetry Day in the UK (the theme this year is “counting” — and no doubt, for those of you with kids here, another chance for you to hear some rhyme in some form at some point through the day.
Mmeanwhile, I’d like to make a small claim for poetry’s efficacy? utility? (I think they take my poetry card away if I use the word ‘utility’ in the context of poetry) when it comes to some of the challenges so many of us post about here: AI, automation, all that jazz.
No doubt some of you will have asked chatGPT to write you a poem, and it comes back with… something. Ask it again, and perhaps you’ve had the experience that I have that the second output is a lot worse. And the quality degrades further the more you ask it to versify. (Or is this just a poet projecting?)
My small claim here is that that outcome is inevitable (for the moment, perhaps not forever…) because — however we might wish it so — poetry is not merely or simply an expected statistical arrangement of words. How could it be? Standard deviation poetry, statistically significant poetry is, as of yet, is not a thing.
Poetry is poetry precisely because of the unexpected connections it allows us to make — between concepts, ideas, notions, words… And through those unexpected connections, understand the world, us, a little better. Or make the world a little better, in our own ways. Creatively transform it. Make new things.
Of course, unexpected connections is an un-fancy way of saying simile and metaphors. And similes and metaphors are where we as humans have most advantage over AI right now.
By accident tech will spit out good metaphors and similes. But only by accident. Humans can do so by design, reliably. And the humans who are best at this, he says grandly and self-aggrandisingly, are the poets.
You can be a bit of a poet too, and keep AI at bay for a bit, for now, by strengthening your metaphoric muscle. How? A meme on X once said: “We get it poets: things are like other things.” So the dare becomes: what things like what things? Be wild! Be bold! Your alarm didn’t go off, it catapulted you into a blue minute. You’re not compiling a spreadsheet, you’re making magpie accounts. You’re not writing a social media strategy, you are sending flares up to digital skies to attract devotees.
It gets addictive after a while. So this National Poetry Day, think more like a poet by making your metaphors mightier, and your similes skew-whiff. And leave ChatGPT crying in the corner.
