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LLM

I looked at Charles Bernstein’s recent LLM collection, enjoyed it, and I have been half thinking about the future of the art, in those terms. LLM is a statistical process, and I don’t think that sort of roughness is how poetry works, let alone how poets write it (however wrong we are).

If you look at The Waste Land and think what sets it apart as the greatest poem in the English language, that all – any way to approach that question, be that historical context or talent – rests on the logic of language. Just to get on with the metaphor: the true and false aspect of logical reasoning/syntax are similar to technique and ultimately disappears (if only for a time while we all catch up). Deliberately indeterminate.

And I reckon that vague statistical reasoning is the exact opposite not only of how poets learn to write poetry but also what it means (however it is curated or presented).