I enjoy poetry, both reading and writing it, though I find a fair amount of it insufferable, including a fair amount of my own.
A lot of poetic ideas begin as dreck (as they must, or they won't begin at all). But — this is the secret — if you somehow strike the balance of stifling your inner editor while still powering through revisions, eventually you might end up with something that truly sparkles and surprises: the musicality of language and the expression of a feeling or experience that no straightforward telling can approximate.
Or sometimes it happens on the first try.
In any case, I was interested to read this week in Vox about public access (talktotransformer.com) to a new version of a synthetic-language system developed by OpenAI, a founder of which was Elon Musk. The artificial intelligence is designed to construct coherent paragraphs by adapting "to the style and content of the conditioning text."
I was game for an experiment. But I wasn't about to volunteer writing I like, so I dug up some literally navel-gazing dreck I once thought up in the shower, then entered it into the engine.
Here's me, kicking things off:
Water from the shower head,
willed from the tap,