NO ONE ACTUALLY BELIEVES IN ABSTRACT ART:

One of the most formative poets in my life is Gerard Manley Hopkins, a 19th century British Jesuit priest. By all accounts, Hopkins was a dry preacher and an overworked teacher, but he was a poet of staggering talent. His prosody -- the manner and aesthetic of his poetic lines -- were out of place and time, equally or more stylistic than writers a hundred years after him. His poems were dense and dynamic; his phrases were fresh and his images jarring. His locus, though, was Christ. Hopkins's union of style, substance, and spirituality remains a marvel.

McLuhan, a Catholic convert, was drawn to Hopkins both because of his faith (Hopkins had also converted, like others at Oxford) and the poet's oddly modern linguistic mode. McLuhan thought that "Pied Beauty," one short poem, was a "catalogue of the notes of the sense of touch," a "manifesto of the nonvisual, and like Cezanne or Seurat, or Rouault it provides an indispensable approach to understanding TV." McLuhan's sweeping claim is ultimately true: Hopkins's poetic approach transcended his medium and his time.

I asked ChatGPT to write a poem that parodied Hopkins's "God's Grandeur." The original poem begins with a declarative, classic first line: "The world is charged with the grandeur of God." That grandeur, Hopkins writes, "will flame out, like shining from shook foil; / It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil / Crushed." Three lines in, and the word and sense play is dizzying: "shining" and "shook" blend together, made parallel with the alliterations of "gathers" and "greatness," as well as "ooze" and "oil." The decision to push "crushed" to the following line is so smart, its finality prefacing the poem's only, and central, question: "Why do men then now not reck his rod?"

"God's Grandeur" is a poem about how generations have "trod" across the earth, as "all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil." The first stanza is dirty and mucky; the second stanza glows with nature, where "lives the dearest freshness deep down things." What saves us, Hopkins reveals, is the Holy Ghost, the illumination of Christ.

Like much of Hopkins's verse, it is deeply skilled, devotional, and -- I say this in the best possible way -- it is strange. I could have asked ChatGPT to write an essay on it, but knew that essay would ken and spin from an encyclopedic stroll through human writings. I wanted ChatGPT to make something derived from, but not derivative.

"Oh how the world is full of waste and shame," the program began its poem, "The garbage heaps pile high, the oceans choked, / The air is thick with pollution's choking cloak, / And all creation groans in anguished pain." "Waste and shame" is an odd phrase -- the implication of the stanza as a whole is that the world does not feel such shame, so it is as if the program attempted to simultaneously create a text and append an outside perception. "Oceans choked" could work as a phrase, but "choking" in the next line is a clunky repetition.

Is it folly to parse these lines? The bigger problem, though, is one of tone. Apparently the program perceived "parodies" to mean "write a version of." Now, I could have offered it feedback, which likely would have resulted in a better poem -- but its revisions would then be an extension of my knowledge of Hopkins, and, likely, my own poetic inclinations.

Perhaps I am raging too much against this machine. I'm guilty of paltry drafts -- and my own weren't dashed on the screen in seconds. ChatGPT can't write good poetry, yet; but why does it matter?

I suspect that my desire to debunk the program's artistic attempts is a matter of survival. I am trying to affirm the value of human creation, and it seems easy enough to deconstruct the program's flimsy attempts at verse. In The Spider's Thread: Metaphor in Mind, Brain, and Poetry, the poet and psychologist Keith Holyoak considers how the genre of "found poetry" complicates our ideas of traditional creativity. Ranging from blackout poems, where poets armed with Sharpies darken a newspaper column to discover a poem, to poetic lines culled from subway station ads and spam messages, found poems require both an existing text and a human curator.

Tweet   @brothersjudd