Why Plath Rhymes With Barbie.
What poetry teaches about AI art.
Last year I taught my screenwriting course in a room on a third floor with a view of the sun setting on Peckham. The lift, like most, intoned “doors opening” but, by some accident of programming, started our journey with the far more ominous phrase “doors are closing.” It even said it in a voice oddly urgent, hushed and plaintive, like it was risking everything to warn us. “Doors are closing”, I still marvel at the power of a single word to electrify a sentence.
I’ve long been a fan of found poetry. Those accidental art works that come into existence not through deliberate creative act but chance or mistake. The first I remember was another warning about doors hidden in a sign. I used to travel to school by train, the doors operated by two black rubber buttons on a panel labelled in the middle “Doors”. Above this was the command “Open” and at the bottom was “Close”. I could only ever read it as a whole, “Open Doors Close”, a bleak start to the school day.
I once brought this up to win an argument with a long suffering English Teacher. She’d given out photocopies of different collections of words and asked which were poems and which were not. I think her plan had been to seed a doubt in the minds of those in the class who taken against Sylvia Plath because she didn’t rhyme, those who felt all you had to do to make a poem was write stuff funny on the page. She gave me what turned out to be a contents list from a book of poems, not a poem, just a collection of titles. I claimed this was a poem. Miss Gordon informed me it wasn’t. In no mood to give ground I embarked upon an impassioned close reading of the meaning I had drawn from the page. I referenced “Open Doors Close” as proof of my point that a poem is in the reading not the writing.
My English teacher was right of course. Not just anything can be elevated to the status of poetry through the
simple act
Of
Enjambment. In the
Same way that you don’t actually make something into a poem by reading it in the voice of Richard Burton. Although, to be fair, putting on any sort of “poetry voice” can lend a surprisingly plangent resonance to lines like…
You can brush my hair, undress me everywhere
Imagination, life is your creation
Get the right tone of erotic desolation in your voice and this could be Plath in full surrender mode, rather than Aqua in their 1997 classic “Barbie Girl”. Even the refrain “C’mon Barbie lets go party” can sound like Burton cajoling Taylor out of a drunken funk by pouring another glass and hailing a taxi. The poem here found not in the writing but the listening.
To some extent all poetry, all art, is found by us. We’re not supposed to be in favour of letting computers compose pictures. AI art takes away jobs, probably, and magic definitely. But this fear confuses the magic of creation with the magic of witness. When we witness a piece of art, a poem, a painting, a film, we don’t simply see through the eyes of the creator of that work, witnessing their magic purely as they wished us to. We marvel at the beauty of a sunrise but mostly we don’t any longer credit that beauty to a creator who knew their love for us would resonant best as a streak of extraordinary pink across a looming blue sky. Even when the natural world is curated, for instance in a well tended garden, we are happy to share the credit between the gardener and her blooms. We don’t angst that her creation was expressed only by placing the flowers, not in how they found their final form.
AI is a tool in the same way a seed is. Though its accidents are capable of the same profundity as sunrises or roses, unlike those its creativity is still tethered to an artist, even if their art is closer to gardening than sketching.
But if all art is found by us, why don’t we find it everywhere? Why are some things still not poems, even when their creators intend them to be? What about the rhyme my class thought Plath had left out? Why does rhyme matter? What is it doing? What is it? Words that happen to end in similar sounds? Pinning our ideas together with rhyme should be like arranging our books by colour rather than subject, confusing rather than clarifying.
“History doesn’t repeat but it rhymes” is supposed to mean that we don’t relive the past exactly but are held by a pattern. The revolutions of France, America and Russia are all different yet share the shape of revolutions. It’s a phrase that tells us less about history than it does about rhyme. Rhymes are words that sound the same but are not the same. They illuminate each other through both their sameness and their difference.
Break the idea of rhyme free from sound and all real poetry rhymes. All poetry is the art of placing things carefully together in such a way as to highlight both the sameness and the difference. The tension of this brings a weight of meaning and significance. This can be done with rhyme or rhythm or just the spacing on the page that jolts the eye and forces it to make fresh conection between ideas. How are these things the same? How are they different? How do these aspects of the connection create a story?
A badly rhymed poem is bad because the words are either too the same or too different. The tensions snaps or hangs loose and no deeper meaning is allowed in, no story is told. Sunrises rhyme with clear skies because they are both the same and very different. Doors are all fundamentally the same but also open ones are the exact opposite of closed. In this doors are the same as hope, as desire, as opportunity, but unlike doors, these things, once closed, may not easily open again.
In case you’re wondering the portrait of Sylvia Plath in this article was created by artist Hadi Karimi using 3D graphics tools I don’t understand and the doll is, I think, a vintage “Midge” (Barbie’s best friend) rather than the girl herself. In terms of AI art I’m obsessed with this collection of images generated to imagine what Burning Man would have looked like had it happened in 1963.
I imagine some of you will be quite angry with me for standing up for AI art. Please do take to social media to attack me. I worry that my writing is often too calm and thoughtful to get people angry enough to furiously publicise it for me so please, even if you enjoyed it, can you post this on instagram calling me some sort of a prick and denouncing me as the worst thing you’ve read this week? Please?