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Monthly,
the Steiny Road Poet
presents a new poem to
the New Room Poets, a
workshop she joined
over 25 years ago. In
the past month of March
being somewhat over
taxed with attending a
national literary book
fair and convention as
well as the stark
reality of her country
starting a war in the
Middle East, she was
coming up empty for
writing a poem.
That’s when she
decided to test Chatgpt
and see what this
artificial intelligence
generator could come up
with. She wrote three
lines that are a take
off on Elizabeth
Bishop’s
villanelle “One
Art.”
One Art [excerpt] by Elizabeth Bishop
The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Here’s what she told Chatgpt to do:
Write a villanelle using these opening lines:
The spark of growing smart easy to achieve
Start by convincing others you’re a dunce
The rest absolutely a snap to conceive
Here’s how the AI generator responded:
The spark of growing smart easy to achieve
Start by convincing others you’re a dunce
The rest absolutely a snap to conceive
Pretend the mind is slow, the wit naïve,
Let puzzled looks accumulate at once—
The spark of growing smart easy to achieve.
Hold back the quick reply you might have sleeve,
Allow a pause where others rush and pounce;
The rest absolutely a snap to conceive.
For when they think you dull, they rarely cleave
To watching close; their vigilance will flounce—
The spark of growing smart easy to achieve.
Then thought may wander freely through the weave
Of quiet plans no skeptic will pronounce;
The rest absolutely a snap to conceive.
Thus hidden fires burn brighter to retrieve
What open brilliance might too soon renounce—
The spark of growing smart easy to achieve,
The rest absolutely a snap to conceive.
Steiny thought the AI
generated poem not bad
for the most part but
in the third stanza,
the phrase “you
might have
sleeve” made no
sense. She responded to
Chatgpt:
“what does sleeve
mean in this line and
did you make a mistake
using it”[Notice
that Steiny used no
capitalization or
punctuation and AI was
perfectly able to
understand the
question.]
Here’s the AI answer:
Yes—good eye.
That line is a little
awkward, and your
instinct is right to
question it.
The line was:
Hold back the quick reply you might have sleeve
What I intended was the idiom
“have up your sleeve,”
meaning a
hidden idea, trick, or resource kept in reserve
. The phrase comes
from the image of
concealing something in
a sleeve to reveal
later.
However, I
did make a mistake
in the phrasing. In English the idiom
requires the preposition
:
·
“have up your sleeve”
Without up and your,
the phrase sounds
incomplete and
unnatural. So
metrically I was trying
to compress the idiom,
but it ended up reading
like an error rather
than a poetic
compression.
A corrected line could be:
· Hold back the quick reply you keep up your sleeve,
· Hold back the quick reply you’ve kept up your sleeve,
· Hold back the clever answer up your sleeve.
Or, if we want to keep the villanelle rhythm cleaner:
Hold back the quick reply you keep up your sleeve.
So yes—the
meaning was intentional
(a hidden clever
answer), but the
wording was flawed.
Steiny than asked this:
what famous villanelle
is this villanelle
written from
Your villanelle is most clearly modeled on
Do Not Go Gentle
into That Good Night by
Dylan Thomas, the
most famous villanelle
in English.
That poem established the pattern most modern villanelles
imitate:
· Two
refrains
(lines 1 and 3 of the opening tercet) that
repeat in a fixed pattern.
· Five
tercets
followed by a
quatrain.
· Only
two rhyme sounds.
· The refrains alternating through the poem and joining in
the final couplet.
Thomas’s refrains are:
· “Do not go gentle into that good night,”
· “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
Your poem follows the same structural logic:
· Refrain 1:
“The spark of growing smart easy to
achieve”
· Refrain 2:
“The rest absolutely a snap to conceive”
These alternate through the tercets and then appear together at
the end—exactly as in Thomas’s villanelle.
More broadly, Thomas’s poem itself belongs to the long
villanelle tradition that includes famous examples such as:
· **One Art by Elizabeth Bishop
· **Mad Girl’s Love Song by Sylvia Plath
But structurally—and in the way the refrains carry the
argument—your poem most closely echoes
Dylan Thomas’s
model.
If you'd like, I can also show
exactly how the villanelle
repetition pattern works
and map your poem line-by-line
onto the standard scheme (A1 b A2 / a b A1 …), which is a
helpful tool when revising villanelles.
Steiny’s question is somewhat ambiguous because the answer
might apply both to Steiny’s beginning stanza and the AI
generated stanzas. Clearly, Chatgpt was using the Dylan Thomas
villanelle as its model. Steiny’s first and third lines had an eleven
beat count just like Bishop’s villanelle. Also, her subject matter
and tone were sassy like “One Art.”
What Steiny learned from this exercise is that AI can write a
reasonably good/smart villanelle with some guidance. AI is
likely to do ok when the poem is in a form. What it is not going
to be good at is writing a poem that takes the top of your head
off because the poem has taken an experimental swerve. Take
for example Steiny’s villanelle “all American girl” which slightly
alters the repeating lines and makes the villanelle form
something new.
all American girl
by Karren L. Alenier
Cousin Donna up in air
at death you said no ground no burn
save my body life’s not fair
brain surgeries took big hair
bald is stylish my smile stern
voguish Aunt Rona I’m your heir
cranioplasty yet brain bared
wear that helmet don’t be stubborn
save your body yeah life’s not fair
Michael my son promise me swear
no urn no plot but a vault where
Mama Donna is up in air
the rabbi led Hebrew prayer
2 children 10 grands 1 great earned
her body rights to death with flair
outside in cold on metal chairs
why we puzzled we tried to learn
all perfect Donna stored in air
saved her body though life’s not there
from how we hold on, published 2021 by Broadstone Books
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Writings
