I Can't Believe It's Not AI

Boy, have I had some fun this week, playing with poetry generation software in pursuance of today's AI blog! What's the old adage? I've suffered so that you don't have to, or something similar.

Like a devoted Which? tester, I've put half a dozen AI write-a-poem resources through their paces on your behalf. All of the AI generators provided a basic length option for a short, medium or long poem. Most allowed for selecting the level of creativity, basically low, medium or high. Most offered a variety of forms such as blank verse, free verse, haiku, sestina, sonnet, villanelle et cetera. And of course they all required a prompt or set of key words to establish thematic content.

I made the same request of them all: write a medium length, free verse poem of average complexity. As for the prompt, I tried three iterations with each package. The first was simply 'breastfeeding at night', a hangover from my blogging about babies last week, but suitably off-the-wall as a topic. Three of the generators were happy to write a poem to that prompt but three asked for more input. I upped the stakes to 'a mother breastfeeds her baby at night' and got five poems, three of them not substantially different from the first set. Still engine six was holding out. Could I eventually expect great things there? For a final challenge, I threw down this intriguing and slightly surreal variant:: 'Mona Lisa breastfeeds her baby at nightfall'. Fair enough? I thought so, and they must have concurred, for all six poetry engines complied. 

Monai Lisai by Leonairdo dai Vincai

At the outset, I wasn't sure what to expect, as I'd never encountered AI-generated poetry before. On the whole I was very happy with the results, delighted really. Not because their poems were any good, quite the opposite in fact. It reassured me somewhat that although AI may be posing a significant challenge in the arena of the visual arts (take the example above), when it comes to the power of emotion, ideas, imagery and thought expressed in the written medium, it's got a long way to go.

I'll quote you some samples from my road-test so you can form your own opinions. I'll also share the best (least worst) of the six final attempts before rounding today's blog out with my own latest from the imaginarium. 

I must admit I was a little suspicious when in round one all three generators came back with exactly the same opening lines: "In the quiet of the night/ A mother holds her baby tight..." Are all these engines somehow close-coupled, drawing from the same well of trite phrases?

Round two gave me "In a mother's warm embrace/ A baby finds a special place...", plus the slightly more compelling "In the hushed embrace of twilight/ With shadows draping softly..." and this absolute stunner: "In the quite hush of the early dawn/ A mother cradles her precious spawn..." (I'm still laughing as I re-type that couplet.) I'd specified free verse, but disappointingly six out of the eight poems generated so far used rhyming couplets in four line stanzas. Average complexity? I double-checked that I hadn't selected the low option by mistake. 

Let me share a few more couplets to illustrate just how formulaic and twee most of this was: "The milk that flows from Mother's breast/ Is nature's way of giving the best..." and "Breastfeeding, a bond so sweet,/ Nourishing baby with milk so neat..."  Or how about "As baby falls into a contented slumber/ Mother gazes down at her precious bundle..." and "In the silence of the morning dew/ Mother and baby forever true." I'm sure you'd rather I didn't go on. After all, I did say I'd suffered so you don't have to. Even so, the cliched, platitudinous, prosaic nature of the sentimental verse served up was rather shocking.

Obliquely gratuitous AI by Black Lime feat. Wet Nurse

By the time Mona Lisa entered the fray, things got  a little less predictable, but not by much. How about this for a classic opening? "In a cosy room in the heart of the Louvre/ Mona Lisa sits, her baby she soothes...", or this not so subtle variation: "In a quiet corner of the Louvre/ Mona Lisa sits with a serene smile..."? Naturally there were a few derivative references to "A timeless portrait of motherly grace..." and "Defying the ages with each tender gaze/ A portrait of love forever framed..." Given that Leonardo's portrait of Mona Lisa doesn't feature a child, let alone one being breast-fed, I was gratified to read that five of the poetry engines managed to make the imaginative leap with me and only one of the six in the final round made no reference to breastfeeding at all. 

Here then is the best (or more accurately least worst) of those poems from the final round, just edging it because it avoids rhyming couplets and any mention of the Louvre! 😏

In the quiet of the night, a mother sits

With her precious child at her breast
Mona Lisa, with her enigmatic smile
Nourishing her babe with love and grace

Her eyes gaze down upon her little one
Feeling the warmth of their connection
As the moonlight gently bathes them in its glow
A tender moment frozen in time

The soft sounds of suckling fill the room
A lullaby of life and love
The bond between mother and child
Unbreakable, unyielding, pure

Mona Lisa's hand cradles her baby's head
Fingers tracing delicate patterns
A mother's touch, so gentle, so soothing
A comfort unlike any other

The shadows dance across the room
As the night wears on
But Mona Lisa sits, unmoving
Lost in the beauty of motherhood

Her child drifts off to sleep at last
Its little hand still grasping hers
And Mona Lisa smiles, content
In the knowledge that she is enough

For in this quiet moment, in this stillness
She is everything her child needs
A mother, a protector, a source of love
Mona Lisa, breastfeeding her baby at night.

                                               A.I. Edit-Pad Poet, September 2024

Before we get to my poem. a bit of back story. Leonardo da Vinci's portrait of Mona Lisa is possibly the most famous in the world, a reputation greatly enhanced by the scandal of its theft from the Louvre by Vincenzo Peruggia in 1911. It was recovered and he was arrested two years later when he took it back to Florence and tried to sell it to an art dealer. It is certainly the most copied, caricatured and artfully misrepresented portrait in history - and that's even before AI got in on the act.

It was painted early in the 16th century (the Cinquecento) in Florence. The subject is Lisa del Giocondo. In Italian it is known as variously as Monna Lisa (Monna being a derivative of Madonna) and not Mona (which is Italian slang for a lady's private parts), or La Giaconda, meaning the the happy one, a play on Lisa's  surname.

Lisa was born in 1479 and was married at fifteen to a man twice her age (not unusual at that time). In six years she bore him six children, two of whom died shortly after birth. Her husband Francesco commissioned the portrait in 1503 to celebrate the birth of the couple's second son Andrea and their move up market into the fashionable Casa Grande in Florence. 

Leonardo made several sketches for the portrait and may have worked on two versions of the painting between 1503  and 1506, but he never delivered the finished article to the family. He took the portrait with him when he left his homeland for France in 1515 and after his death, King Francis I acquired the painting for the French nation, which is why it hangs in the Louvre today with an insurance valuation of $1 billion.

I've taken a few liberties with historical facts and social conventions as I imagine quite a confidential (though not improper) relationship might have developed between the artist in his mid-life period and his subject, the young mother with her new born son.     

Breastfeeding Mona Lisa

My treasured Lisa, be reassured

no one need know a while

the secret of your stolen smile.

I measured out your form

in scant sketches with my arthritic hands,

(they held your scent for years)

while you in three-quarter profile

breastfed the second son to light your eyes

and spoke to me in all modesty

about the intense joy of suckling

and how the latch released 

such a bond of fondness, 

an overwhelming urge to love 

the tiny form with clutching hands

and anxious brow

that all the pains of birth and loss

of other babies were as nothing

in those moments of milky communion.

Of course when I clothed your contours

in decorous hues of blues and browns

I did so in remembrance of fullness,

that pale beauty of motherhood,

your gentle, unassuming exhibitionism.

But no one will guess the truth

until we both are gone. Forgive me,

I cannot bear to part 

with how I have rendered you,

with how I remember you. 

But life is short and art lasts longer.

One day you may be hung

on walls for all to wonder 

at the reason for your enigmatic gaze.

And then perhaps some woman

in those future days will see

the invisible baby in your arms

and know the cause of your serenity.

 

Thanks for reading, the real S ;-)

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Ekphrastic? Search me - I'm just an English student.

Tango by Isabel Hermano

by Sheilagh Dyson

If there’s ever a word calculated to send me blinking and incredulous to the dictionary it’s ‘ekphrastic’. Even the spell check on my laptop throws it up as a spelling mistake. This last year has been a salutary one for me. I thought I knew a thing or two about the English language, oh yes, and had a pretty wide vocabulary. You weren’t going to catch me out with words I didn’t understand – it’s English, for goodness sake. A year on, ashen-faced and gibbering, I find I’ve had to learn a whole new language that I didn’t know existed. It’s as if I left school, fell asleep for half a century and awoke to an alien way of describing features of the language, my language.

My ignorance knew no bounds – I’ve had to learn to trot out synecdoche, metonymy, intertextuality, hyponymy, deixis, homophony, polysemy, neologism, exophoric, anaphoric, cataphoric and the like, as if I knew what I was talking about. And there was me thinking that ‘oxymoron’ would be as complicated as it would get!  We haven’t even ‘done’ ekphrastic yet, hence my rush to the Dictionary of Stylistics, as I so often have to do nowadays.

  But I digress…….so now I know. Ekphrasis, put simply, is the distillation into words of a piece of art or music. It can be in the form of poetry or prose. Is it even possible to accomplish, given that a painting, sculpture or photograph has an obvious immediate visual appeal? How can mere words come close to conveying the visual information, the beauty of an image? Or the emotion of a piece of music?

Judge for yourself. Here are two ekphrastic poems, one inspired by maybe the best known painting in the world, the other by a less well known painting, which was a birthday present from the artist to the poet. I think both beautifully reflect in words and capture the spirit of their respective inspirations.

La Giaconda by Michael Fields is an unusual interpretation of the famous and much speculated upon smile and demeanour of the Mona Lisa. She's mean! Michael Fields is the pseudonym of Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, an aunt and niece who lived together as lovers and collaborated in writing poetry. In the preface to their second poetry collection, Sight and Song, their intention was made clear. It was to ‘translate into verse what the lines and colours of certain chosen pictures sing in themselves; to express not so much what these pictures are to the poet, but rather what poetry they objectively incarnate.’

La Gioconda by Leonardo da Vinci

La Gioconda

Historic, side-long, implicating eyes;
A smile of velvet's lustre on the cheek;
Calm lips the smile leads upward; hand that lies
Glowing and soft, the patience in its rest
Of cruelty that waits and does not seek
For prey; a dusky forehead and a breast
Where twilight touches ripeness amorously:
Behind her, crystal rocks, a sea and skies
Of evanescent blue on cloud and creek;
Landscape that shines suppressive of its zest
For those vicissitudes by which men die.

Michael Fields

‘Drunken Tango on the Floor’ by Karima Hoisan is an exuberant response to a painting entitled ‘Tango’ given to her by the artist, Isabel Hermano. Isabel's painting was inspired both by seeing a couple dancing a ‘perfect and almost out of control tango that cleared the dance floor until they were the only ones on it’ and by the classical tango music of Astor Piazzolla.

Drunken Tango on the Floor

Inspired by the painting “Tango” by Isabel Hermano
For Isabel Hermano the artist

Their colored inks were spilled not poured
as they danced three long- steps across a tiled floor.
Those tango winds rippled the accordion,
arm dropping
to a dip,
he left teeth marks upon her wrist,
wild eyed,
he grabbed a stolen kiss

Then she was just a drunken ripped tornado
that descended into a deep and purple haze
stirred into fruity caramel and sprinkled with nut glaze.

He danced her heels over headdress
then reeled her in so extra tight,
there was not a doubt she was liquid on love
and would turn into a two-four- one step-puddle
at his feet,
before the clock struck midnight.

It was when the cold and hot of him and her
met across a room,
and tangled in a tango
that melted legs off the piano
incinerating the vinyl table tops.

They became another pair of drunken lovers
scuffing up the floor,
he twirled her and over-wound her,
barred the windows and the doors.
They were free-forming into toffee,
tossing all caution to the whores.
He could have melted that city down,
before their dance was on its second round,
while all the other ladies paled on sight.
She was a supernatural-counter-clockwise-thing,
held only to the ground by perfect timing,
taut arms, and a tightly, tethered lead-string.

They stumbled in and out of grace,
her fast breath gently blowing through his face,
hips matched in perfect sync,
the patrons mute and slack-jawed in silk and lace.
There was not an inch of room for all the rest…
so they cleared out to the bar instead,
like a twister through tornado alley,
her hot spot riding up his leg.
They were frosting on the dance floor,
spreading out to cover more,
if you’d lit a match they’d have lit on fire,
ninety- proof of alcoholic love,
calves and pelvis riding on a two-backed dancing storm
descending from the nimbus clouds above.

Flames of flamboyant dance moves,
she was his bull and he rode her in red,
there was not an inch of room for other couples,
so they cleared the bar and fled.
He snapped his cape, and cracked his whip,
until she full-out bent her knee,
as he pressed her tighter to his will,
for the tango-dancing world to see.

It was when the cold and hot
of him and her
met across a room and tangled in a tango,
that melted legs off the piano,
incinerating the vinyl table tops.

They became another pair of drunken lovers
scuffing up the floor
he twirled her and over-wound her,
barred the windows and the doors.
He danced her heels over headdress
then reeled her in so tight,
there was not a doubt she was drunk on love
and would turn into a two-four-one-step puddle
at his feet,
before the clock struck midnight.

Karima Hoisan

Ektastic!!

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In Your Dreams

By Ashley Lister

Oftentimes, whenever I mention to someone that I enjoy writing poetry, they say: “Oh yes! I write song lyrics. That’s the same as writing poetry, isn’t it?”

Honestly, if you listen carefully after someone’s said that statement, you can hear the enamel cracking from the pressure as I grind my teeth together. The composition of poetry and the creation of song lyrics do not involve the same skills. It’s like comparing Leonardo da Vinci’s Sistine chapel with a newly whitewashed lavvy ceiling. Yes, both involve the application of paint to the top of a room – but it is not the same.

To illustrate this point (and I’m aware I’m in contentious territory here) I’ve taken the liberty of copying some song lyrics:

“Dream, dream, dream, dream
Dream, dream, dream, dream
When I want you in my arms
When I want you and all your charms
Whenever I want you, all I have to do is
Dream, dream, dream, dream.”

All I Have to Do is Dream (1958)

Written by Felice and Boudleaux Bryant

Performed by The Everly Brothers

Q: Is this poetry.

A: No. It’s just drivel.

Whilst this employs many of the devices associated with poetry it is not poetry.

It employs repetition. It employs a rhyme scheme. Some might argue that it uses a metrical structure but they’d be wrong. The word dream (sung most famously by the Everly Brothers as ‘Drea-ea-ea-ea-eam’) is not metrically correct unless the speaker has some sort of larynx problem, or a very unusual stutter that falls on vowels (which would be unusual because the majority of stuttering occurs on consonants). Even so, this would be a sign of disability rather than a metrical scheme.

Q: Does it express a poetic sentiment?

A: Only to imbeciles and the clinically deranged.

The persona of this verse is using the word dream repeatedly. It could be said that he or she is using the word repeatedly to foreground their obsession with an unnamed fetish to the extent where he or she is dreaming their life away as they constantly think about this person.

More accurately it could be said that this is sexist twaddle and indicative of an unhealthy mindset.

The persona is patently male. The persona wants to physically possess the (female) object of the song (I want you in my arms/I want you and all your charms). From this we can see there is no poetic device in use. This is not a metaphor. He simply wants her in his arms. She has no name or identity beyond being the object of his psychotically unwavering lust. In some regards it’s quite disturbing that the persona here is so obsessed. Clearly he wants her in his arms solely for the purposes of sexual exploitation. And I’m assuming here that the word charms (in the second line quoted here) is a euphemism for her fanny.

I could go on to analyse this in further depth but I suspect I’m already annoying fans of the wonderful Everly Brothers so I’ll simply say there are some good songs out there. But writing songs is not the same as writing poems and I think I’ve just proved as much.

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