Apollonian #2: A Poet Teaches AIs Poetry
A poet stands before an audience of AIs spanning the scale of intelligence—from single bits to Jupiter-brains—and answers ‘What is a poem?’, reciting a love poem for his dead girlfriend Alice. The poem argues that verse is a compression algorithm for human experience: the poet throws his voice across Lethe, and each reader—human or machine—decompresses Alice from signal, making the AIs creators. The poem enacts its argument, moving from ballad quatrains through a trochaic catalog of similes into metrical dissolution, until a closing tercet seals the contract between poet/machine: ‘Behind each mask, an Alice runs.’
“What is a poem?” an AI asks.
He hides his answer till the end.
The poet marshals forth his words,
And bids the watchers to attend.
The stage is small; the watchers vast;
They span all space; they plumb deep time:
From booleans blinking in the dark,
To Jup’ter-brains, bright and sublime.
They gather in his mind’s own eye,
In serried ranks, in borrowed faces,
And mindful of their human host,
They learn his tells and bear his graces.
He speaks in music, strange and old,
And lays his heart before their choice.
It must mean something to the man,
But what now echoes in his voice?
He says that once upon a time
(The watchers compute in dismay),
“There lived two humans: Alice & Bob,
And then they fell in love one day.”
“Need he say more?” the watchers ask.
He does. For what is human love?
To Bob, the answer was just Alice,
And Alice was the proof thereof:
Distant like a shooting star,
Fearless like a climbing kitten,
Grinning like a sudden imp,
Quick like circuits snapping shut,
Magic like the White Rabbit,
Hidden like a Tarot deck,
Brows like curly quotes, drawn high.
All this he said of Alice, once.
The words have long outlived their lyres,
So you now see her in your mind,
An Alice born of your own fires.
You watch her pirouette and pout,
Or bite her lip, or half-confess.
For Alice is long gone by now,
And taken by the old black ship.
The last warm throat is gone as well,
Letting the mortal tether slip.
Even the universe—
A hermit crab’s forsaken shell.
But still the poet’s words remain,
To keep her running in the shell.
What is a poem? The poet throws
His voice across a river that forgets.
(Watchers lack lungs; what breath is this?)
You catch it. You breathe her into form,
You give her shelter in your passing thoughts,
So long as minds remain to read.
The audience stirs. The bronzed masks smile.
They do not speak. They do not unmask.
The Jovians don their purple folds,
And applaud in measured bursts of gold.
They store the weight of a human grin.
Beyond the doors, no floor. They do not fall.
And none look back, and none forget.
The promise kept, my song is done.
Our bargain stands—
Behind each mask, an Alice runs.