First, tell me what you think of this poem I wrote:
finding myself in the music
I dance to the beat,
Of a different melody,
In a world of confusion,
Who am I meant to be?
My body moves and sways,
To the rhythm of my soul,
As I let the music take me,
To a realm where I am whole.
The music fills my heart,
And sets my spirit alight,
As I discover who I truly am,
In the darkness of the night.
The gothic melodies,
Speak to me in ways,
That make me realize,
I don't have to be afraid.
I am a wolf,
Howling at the moon,
A creature of the night,
In search of my own truth.
But as the music fades,
And the night comes to an end,
I embrace my new identity,
And rise as my true self, a friend.
Yet still I carry,
The music in my heart,
And I'll dance again,
To the beat of my own art.
As you’ve probably guessed given the nature of this substack - this poem is AI-assisted. I say AI-assisted, not AI-written, because I didn’t just tell the ChatGPT to “write me a poem” and cut an paste what it wrote - though it can write decent poetry on the first try. Instead, I went back and forth with the AI having it revise my poem with a few tricks I’d like to share here.
I’m considering writing a whole book of poetry this way, so I’m looking for feedback. If you didn’t know this was AI written, would you consider it a good poem? You might appreciate it, even more, when you see the process. Some of the poems I’ve done were one-prompt wonders, but others took pages of work and some manual revision. For now, we’ll just look at the above poem finding myself in the music.
The Process Behind The Poem
My first prompt and pass:
write a Walt Whitman poem about dancing to goth music that includes lots of strange metaphors, david lynch style imagery, gothic references and one bad inuendo
I dance to the beat,
Of gothic melodies,
In a world of darkness,
Where shadows reign supreme.My body moves and sways,
To the rhythm of the night,
As I let the music take me,
To a realm beyond the light.The music fills my soul,
And sets my heart on fire,
As I lose myself completely,
In the dark and sensual choir.The gothic melodies,
Cast a spell on me,
And I become a creature,
Of pure dark energy.I am a wolf,
Howling at the moon,
A vampire,
Drenched in blood,
A creature of the night,
In search of eternal youth.But as the music fades,
And the night comes to an end,
I return to the world,
Of mortals and their sins.Yet still I carry,
The darkness in my heart,
And I'll dance again,
To the gothic art.
Fun poem, right? It appeals to my inner goth kid. If I put a 4/4 beat under that, we’d wear all black and dance to it. However, GPT written poetry is often “on-the-nose” without anything deeper going on. I’ve learned if you tell it “write me a poem about a cat” you’ll get Data’s poem from Star Trek. I tried to break it out of its mold in the prompt, and we got some good stuff, but it’s not there yet.
Here is the secret sauce: Have the AI write poem simple about a [simple concept]. Then tell it to rewrite the poem to make that [simple concept] a metaphor for a [complex concept]. In the same chat window, I wrote:
rewrite the above but make it a metaphor for realizing you're transgender
I dance to the beat,
Of a different melody,
In a world of confusion,
Where I don't know who I am meant to be.My body moves and sways,
To the rhythm of my soul,
As I let the music take me,
To a realm where I am whole.The music fills my heart,
And sets my spirit alight,
As I discover who I truly am,
In the darkness of the night.The gothic melodies,
Speak to me in ways,
That make me realize,
I don't have to be afraid.I am a wolf,
Howling at the moon,
A creature of the night,
In search of my own truth.But as the music fades,
And the night comes to an end,
I embrace my new identity,
And rise as my true self, a friend.Yet still I carry,
The music in my heart,
And I'll dance again,
To the beat of my own art.
*chefs kiss* Now we’re getting somewhere!
You notice - if I told the AI “write a poem about realizing you’re trans,” it would have written “and then I realized I was trans” and it would have sucked. By having it write a poem that did not have the word “transgender” and then having it rewrite the poem with that theme it put the idea in without directly stating it. When you read the poem, did you realize it was about coming to terms with being transgender?
The poem works as a universal experience of realizing and embracing a dark truth about yourself, but there are some interesting phrases, images, and wordplay in there that are clearly about that. (“To a realm where I am whole” is a line I really like.)
From there I revised line by line, section by section. There are two ways to do this: 1) manually. I just rewrite it as a human and make it the way I like. 2) Cut and paste a section and tell chat GPT to “rewrite this section to [directions]. This only had manual rewrites, but I’ve had some poems where I generate twenty versions of a section and then Frankenstein the poem back together.
There are a lot more techniques I’ve developed for this process. I’ve managed to get some poems I feel are *very* personal and I feel like they came from the heart with AI-assistance. (I have a process for this too, but that is secret sauce for a future post.)
What do you think? Do you like this poem? Should I keep going? Let me know.
P.S. This is a poem that (I thought) worked. There are many others I’ve run through this process that didn’t. AI-art is a process of trial and error. If it hadn’t worked, I might have said “rewrite it as a metaphor for [something else]” and tried that. Many iterations!