Every day poetry
We are writing and experimenting in your weekly dose of fresh poetry #138
Writing every day
exploring different forms
helps me find my way
and reassess my norms.
April is national poetry month. Now, that kind of thing always tickles me. First of all, I always trip over the word ‘national’. I don’t really know where that is, and why that gets put all over the internet. Why this boundary? Why this limitation?
Then, I gather myself. If one organisation in one nation does this implementation, it’s not a limitation, but an invitation. Poets of all nations, imaginary or not, can join in. It may start as something centralised, but we can decentralise it. Like we do in Web3, the next phase of the internet where decentralisation is one of the defining factors. So, I took that invitation, mixed it with the implementation of the National Poetry Writing Month, which challenges poets to write each day for a month, and created the decentralised CRYpto POetry WRIting MOnth. #CryPoWriMo was born.
Hurray.
For the love of poetry
Now, each day this April, I hope to inspire people to write poetry with a daily prompt delivered through the CryptoPoetry Twitter account and by writing and publishing a poem each day. Why I do that? Well, three reasons. First of all, I love poetry and I would love to see others share in that love. So any reason to celebrate and promote poetry is a good reason to try and do exactly that. Secondly, from my experience just over 10 years ago of writing a poem each day for a year, I learned that the exercise of writing each day may not necessarily produce great writing at that moment, but it is a form of writing training. It helps me write better in the future. I think.
Finding new ways
Lastly, this is a great moment to experiment with and explore new forms of writing. Whether that is poetic forms I have not yet used, or do not use often, or ways of writing. The pressure to produce each day is an incentive to find new ways.
When we are speaking of finding new ways, these days we cannot go around - yep, you guessed it - AI. The large language models known as AI are everywhere now. I have been using AI image creation for a while, experimenting with how to prompt the machine to come up with the output I want. This time, I am feeding the AI my daily poems to come up with an image. Next to the poem, I give it up to 5 modifiers. These are descriptive terms that help define the style of the output. I find myself using terms such as “art deco”, “psychedelic”, “Unreal Engine”. The AI gives me four results. Mostly I am using a new model named SDXL Beta (where SD stands for Stable Diffusion) on the NightCafé studio website. And mostly I find one of the four resulting images good enough to use. Sometimes I am trying again with different modifiers, and once I had to change an acronym (GM) to what it meant (good morning) because the AI kept giving me (General Motors) cars which I did not want.
For one poem, I even employed ChatGPT to not only come up with a prompt - the theme to write the poem about - but also with the poem itself.
What are you experimenting with these days?
PS: the image above consists of 2 images the AI gave me when I fed it the poem above.
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Poetics in life
Kid President. Do you remember him? He made the internet a happy and positive place about a decade ago. There’s much I can say about this, but the most pressing thing is: we need more of this.
And to put his advice into practice: thank you for being here and you, dear reader, are AWESOME!
Poetry elsewhere
Some poems are so rich in imagery, or so good at recovering imagery from your memory, that they take you on a visual journey. This poem by
did precisely that for me. I saw fragments of the movie Y Tu Mama Tambien. What do you see?
There are so many stories to tell. So many people have them safely stored inside. And as they age, who is there to listen? Well, start with this poem by
:
Katie Dozier is a very active poet. Not only does she create a lot of wonderful and versatile poems, but she also hosts a weekly poetry show on Twitter. She is also the one who challenged me to write a poem each day this April. One of the forms she uses regularly, which I have not mastered yet, is the thread poem. It’s an NFT, so it is digitally collectable. Please read Katie Dozier’s thread poem Mad Tea Party.