Quite how it’s come to this, I don’t know. Only hammock tasks come my way these days: low-level planning, proofreading, endless spreadsheet data-entry. Unable to find anything to put on the front burner, I spend my time multi-slacking and clock-sucking. While storm clouds gather in frosted meeting rooms, I feel myself slowly fading into jobsolescence.

Tuesday April 10th

The April issue of Well Versed – The Quarterly Magazine for the Discriminating Poet arrived today, announcing itself with a papery thump on the doormat. Once more my poem has failed to be shortlisted. Mercifully, I noted that neither had Toby Salt’s. On closer inspection, I discovered that this was because he was one of the judges.

He’d described the winning poem as a ‘fascinating experiment at the bleeding interface of literature and technology’. It was called ‘The Alan Turing Prize for Poetry’ and had been written by a computer science Ph.D. student. The first half had been written by the student himself, who finds himself in a poetry competition with a ‘poetry bot’:

The Poet

The whole idea is absurd. It cannot feel

the rightness or wrongness of words

like I, nor describe the moon which hangs

in the changing night sky

as a pancake

as a bruised knee

as a scraped plate.

Reader, such things are innate, arrive in the brain

unbidden, uncaptured by an algorithm,

irreducible to formula, not a racket of tuneless words

played out by some school-hall orchestra

without its dear conductor. Each word in this poem

has been carefully deliberated, hard won,

is not simply one of the many permutations

which might make up a poem.

That’s not the same as poetry, clearly.

It’s no contest really.

The second half was written by the poetry bot and had been generated by a computer programme, featuring a complex set of algorithms which could take apart any given section of text and rewrite it as poetry. It rehashed all the words from the first piece:

The Poetry Bot

A poem is like the tuneless night,

hard-bruised by the rightness

of an uncaptured algorithm

which hangs simply in the sky,

as irreducible as a plate in a school-hall,

or one clearly scraped knee.

A poem is absurd, a pancake formula

to describe the many permutations

of the moon, not deliberated in the brain

by a carefully changing orchestra;

its has-been conductor cannot make up words.

As such, each word is played out whole,

unbidden, not without racket,

nor wrongness. Words arrive;

are innate things which feel (as some might not!).

That’s it. No, really – it’s the same idea.

Of the poetry contest?

This, dear reader, I won.

Toby Salt has described it as the ‘next great development in poetical form, in which we move away from our reliance on the tired tropes of old.’

Some days I feel like a tired trope of old. And I’m utterly sick of Toby Salt’s bleeding interface.

Wednesday April 11th