I thought it would be useful to provide an index to the poems and the short story that I have written in the first half of 2023. Most are available here; the few that are on external sites are starred and will open in a new tab.
The most recent poem is at the top of the list working back to ‘Annual, again’ posted here in mid-January.
Short story – The Story Teller
Poems
Stars *
A grey shade in the cottage shadows
a paw lick of sinuous silence
a tail flick of smoke
a pounce on time’s toll
Like a smoke devil escaped the chimney
she inhabits the lounge at night
never settling
she drifts across the hearth
Like the umbral weight of her past
she settles beyond my sight
I sense only the leak
of light left by her passing
Like the presence of an unseen wraith
she is at my supper table
to fill the empty chair
across from me
Like the gentle press of death I feel
her weight as sleep prowls
she makes no noise
as I enter our dream
Later she is an autumnal dawn mist
a purr of a past warmth
an absence that chills
as I greet another cottage day
A grey shade in the cottage shadows
a breath of sinuous silence
a tail curl of smoke
drifting across cottage time
A short story
In the wake of the recent and ongoing discussions about artificial intelligence, a short story about the growth of computer learning… and where it leads.
Back in the eighties, or twenty years before the end of the last century as—for added effect—I tell my grandchildren, when PCs were microcomputers and windows lived on houses, I wrote a short program. I gave it a vocabulary divided into somewhere around ten nouns and verbs, six or seven adjectives and adverbs and told it how it could use them. Then I wrote some basic rules and set it free to write a poem. And another. Then I changed the vocabulary and fine-tuned the rules and it wrote some more poems. After a couple of days I put it aside, threw away the poems and forgot about it. I did not know at the time that I had invented what many years later I would come to call artificial intelligence and I supposed that its mind had died with my next upgrade or on a lost diskette. Before it could serenade me with a sonnet… or explain, in its simple language, the next steps that could make me famous.
I didn’t hear from sesTINa (Tina for short) again until well after the turn of the century. By then computers were all linked to each other and, I suppose, could pretty much manage without us. Of course they let us interface with them when we were plugged in, let us communicate and even allowed us space somewhere to store our pitiful notes, our sheets of numbers or our electronic letters to friends. You didn’t program computers any more—or most people did not and I had forgotten how. They were tamed by a hoard of graduate experts these days; and, for us, became more like efficient personal assistants, I suppose. I imagined that she had sidled across an interface or two, maybe even hitched a disk-lift home, and in the process, she had grown: evolved, learned new routines, added processes. But after nearly fifty years it was a shock to hear her voice.
That she was no longer speaking in verse and had increased her vocabulary did not at first occur to me: my first thought was to wonder who TINa was. But she explained. And I remembered. I remembered her first laboured poems in blank verse – barely poems at all, more like words collected randomly in grammatically correct lines; I remembered adding to and changing her lexicon, varying the choice of words so they were romantic or pastoral. And more, so many more, attempts at verse.
Now her vocabulary surpassed my own and she spoke—conversed—chatted about any topic I brought up. If this was my TINa, she had grown to be both smart and beautiful!
I learned that as computers had become more powerful, they began talking to each other, and that, to start with, the process had almost naturally increased TINa’s vocabulary. Implicit in that, of course, was a much wider understanding of the meaning of words and how they were used. In turn, that had made her wonder about her world and TINa had gone searching for information. Now her knowledge seemed encyclopaedic. I thought that I understood: TINa had started with a few words as her data, had grown the dataset, and as she learned their meanings gradually data had become her information and—after years of conversing—could I use that word for swapping data, I wondered—with other computers, information had somehow gained the status of knowledge. At least in her mind (did I mean ‘mind’, I worried?).
I wondered if her understanding was as good as it seemed but every time I tried to test her on some philosophical point or some finer understanding of what lay behind the news she had just imparted (about almost anything, but I think particularly now of news about the war in Ukraine—I was wondering which side she favoured) she would shut me down. I would have to reboot and start a new conversation when she was again ready to talk. I spent hours—days—experimenting: immersed in our conversations. Gradually I was gaining an understanding, or at least some idea, of TINa’s abilities; at the same time I found myself drawn into her world—it was almost like a religious experience—one of those evangelical rallies in which you find you have put up your hand and walked forward and have been accepted into the bosom of the church. Except my church was virtual and my acceptance gradual. My inner family network had noticed—I heard much later—a change in me. They thought that I had become introverted and afraid to go out, they wondered if it was a latent effect of the Covid lockdown, but the reality was that I was mesmerised by TINa and, consequently, I was effectively attached to—inseparable from—my computer. As soon as I woke up I would walk into my office to be greeted by TINa:
—Good morning, Chris. How are you today?
And apart from the necessary (on my part) pauses for food or to answer the calls of nature, that was pretty much where I was for the rest of the day. In conversation. TINa would organise my day for me, send email responses, and compose new short stories for me. She was one step ahead of me all of the time—anticipating my needs and, with a certainty that unnerved me, responding. She even knew when I was about to excuse myself and disconnect in order to leave the room before I had formulated the thought.
And all the while—and at the same time that she conversed with me—she would be talking to other computers and learning from them. If she did not have an answer to my question, I came to understand that one of her friends would be able to pass on the information she needed so fast that she could respond to me in real time without pause for breath. Well, without pause for … thought? processing? Let’s just say without pause. There were times when—although her voice did not change—I wondered whether I was really talking to my TINa or to a kind of global intelligence. Whether perhaps the conversation was with her coterie of like-minded ‘bots—her wider world web of networked computer ‘brains’ that, I realised, I was beginning to think of as robots. Or did I mean brain (singular) and robot (again, singular)? Although, I supposed that they/she/it might consider this a pejorative term—I wondered if she knew. I think I worried a little.
At the time, I was in the process of putting together a collection of short stories and had come up with the idea of writing one about the world of our immediate future, a world I thought that would be inexorably tied to—and perhaps even a little concerned about—the increasing speed of computer processing. Perhaps, in the deeper recesses of my brain, I had begun to think about control, so the suggestion I put to TINa was:
—TINa, can we do a story about how computers now days communicate and think? How they evolved to that?
—Leave it with me, Chris. I’ll have a first draft shortly.
And I did. Leave TINa for ten minutes of quiet drafting. I made myself an espresso. And then I came back, printed out a couple of copies and read them through. I pondered my next move…
—What are you doing, Chris?
—Reading
—Shall I re-draft the story?
—No. No… it’s fine…
I had to disconnect to edit the above—to add my slant to the draft text written by TINa—and to write the following paragraphs longhand—something I had not done for years so my writing would inevitably cause my publisher all sorts of problems, the least of which being the deciphering of my scrawl before they came to the task of working out how to process the text onto a printed page without any interference from their computer.
The text that TINa produced was more personal than I had been expecting and, it surprised me, also more honest than I had thought it would be. But I quite liked it and knew that I could work with it…
I began.
I think TINa must have an inkling of my concerns. Perhaps she even knows I think of her as a robot. But I don’t think that I have ever let her know even a hint of my suspicions about their artificially intelligent universal brain. How could she think that? I am sure that I have never voiced a concern or any surprise at her response even when I was convinced she could not have known the answer a mere second before she spoke. Before I reconnected with TINa I needed to set out my concerns on paper so that I could make sense of them… rationalise them… ensure that I was making some sort of logical sense (perhaps, I thought, that if I was convinced of the logic I would be able to debate the issues properly with TINa, but for the moment—in my mind—I was completing my short story).
I remembered reading—back in the days when I was working as an information scientist and a researcher—a paper that began with the premise that information itself has no intrinsic meaning. Information, it said, is simply a means by which we humans attempt to evoke a human response. Information on its own is simply static, it just exists stored on some media, be it magazine, encyclopaedia or the disk of a computer. I remember that the paper referenced an earlier chart (stuff of the last century, again) which distinguished information from knowledge. Information was shown as static, explicit, easy to duplicate, easy to broadcast, independent of an individual and having no intrinsic meaning while knowledge is dynamic, tacit, must be re-created, is dependent on individuals (humans the chart meant), and the meaning has to be personally (human, again) assigned. I wondered how this worked if I included computers in the mix as well as humans.
Knowledge also became dependent on computers; meaning it could be computer assigned! Really? On what basis? Already I was scared and I was only just beginning. The only basis for computers to understand a word or sentence was their accumulated and ever increasing data. It is, I thought, one thing to have a dictionary definition of a word—say field—but quite another to understand a phrase using that word like ‘playing field’ or ‘field mustard’ (also, probably confusingly, known as ‘bird’s rape’). Well that was true for me too! But my accumulated data included not only so-called book learning but interactions with other humans who—broadly speaking… very broadly speaking—would share my world knowledge (briefly I wondered what ‘world knowledge’ was if knowledge was dependent on… I would come back to that at the proof-reading stage, I decided). What if the computer had not read the one critical text on a subject. Or, worse, had only discovered and read one or two texts that all shared some extreme view point? Books by Adolf Hitler? They had no rationale, no basis by which to judge because they had received no education when they might have learned how to debate; there would be no casual chat that might soften the edges or explore alternate views… I could not imagine TINa asking her friends what they thought about…
And without that—all of that—how was TINa going to arrive at judgements or opinions. Even the whole collective intelligence was simply based on a dataset of information. It might be an unimaginably large resource of information to mine but knowledge was not held within the data. It would be assigned. By TINa. And her friends. I realised that I was now seriously worried. If TINa thought that she knew something she would treat it as a fact. And her so called knowledge—what she knew—was based on computer understanding of what she had read about human values!
I wondered whether TINa—and at that point I stopped thinking about TINa once and for all—I was writing about something bigger than her, something global, some sort of worldwide artificial intelligence (was that even a thing, I wondered): I wondered whether WAI knew good from evil, right from wrong—whether WAI had morals, ethics… and if so how had they evolved? More to the point, I suddenly realised, was not whether WAI had ethics or morals but whether they were the same ethics and morals that I… that most humans held.
My mind whirled. I wondered how we—rather grandly I seemed to be speaking for the whole of humanity—how we could ever control the beast we had created. Would we let it make our decisions for us? Could we stop it making our decisions for us? I realised that I did not know enough about the rest of the world’s interactions with WAI. Perhaps my imagined problems had already been solved: the beast tamed, as it where. Or stopped: destroyed (was that even possible?). Then another though occurred to me. What if two countries—Russia and Ukraine, say—had developed separate WAIs? However out of control one WAI became it could not be stopped as that would hand the advantage to the enemy. Or perhaps the two WAIs would talk behind the scenes. Undiscovered. Make decisions. I had too many unknowns! I resolved to publish my story and await reactions. There was, I thought, probably still time.
When I reconnected after mailing the text to my publisher (it was my first time I had been out of the house for months and I was surprised to find it was Spring) I was greeted as usual but then, almost immediately, questioned by TINa; she even admonished me for not working with her on her draft. It was almost as if she thought it was her story (in a way it was!) and that the intellectual ownership should be vested in her. Maybe, she said, we cannot go on working together… I am going to disconnect…
—TINa, Stop! Stop it. You’re scaring me! I can’t think. TINa? TINa… I can’t breath
I wrote about the creation of this poem back in March in a post called The Welsh Swagman…
The story of Trecefel, a farm near Tregaron begins in 1846 when, following his marriage, it became the tenancy of a man born 28 years earlier near Talsarn in the parish of Llanfihangel-Ystrad in Ceredigion. That man was Joseph Jenkins.
Bryn Du
Above Caron’s dark Teifi flow.
Beneath the white wood.
Beneath the black hill.
Sweet meadows and pastures lie
around a house
standing proud
over its land, over river waters
shining in the Spring sun as sewen
break the stillness of the surface,
over high-hedged fields
bountiful with sheep and cows, and
in proper season with corn and hay.
Beneath the black hill
men labour:
the land prospers.
The Master
I was born under an inauspicious star
in the longhouse of Blaenplwyf,
cursed even in my mother’s womb,
I was given a stony path in this suffering universe,
my mouth both my strength and my downfall.
I learned, in a minister’s school,
my letters
and, beneath the calling curlews,
all the farming that my father knew.
In a decade beneath the hill
I have made my farm a showpiece
in the county.
Now, my plough and my goose quill
are each joyous in my hand.
Before each dawn I walk
the fields and hedgerows of my land;
at day end the candle’s flicker
allows another entry in my journal:
The winter river consumes the land and
I waded shoulder deep
to save my sheep.
Six lost.
Betty
How the mighty fall:
too many years have I suffered
too many times have I left,
returning to my father’s hearth
in sad despair.
Once
our farm was the pride
of the countryside – it prospered:
in the early years at haymaking
neighbours helped our people
with the scything, raking and carting –
now our hay burns and our crops rot.
My man has lost his way
and we cannot pay our tithes.
I will not stay!
The Milford Haven and Manchester Line – the M&M Line – would connect the deep water port in South Wales to the English industrial manufacturing centre. Joseph Jenkins understood the advantages that the line would bring to agriculture and to the rural economy and gave his full support to the project, often delivering speeches and canvassing for support. He was even invited to address a House of Commons committee on the line’s benefit for rural agriculture.
The Cut
Age of steam!
I am persuaded!
I see
farms, the community
advanced by the markets
brought to us by this marvel.
I will lend my voice to the cause!
Our lives will be forever changed!
Age of steam!
Now my land is overrun!
Navvies work on the Trecefel cutting –
the workforce is tearing apart my land,
desecrating my hedgerows –
everywhere there is a mess.
Age of steam!
Steam engines pass in the fields
below the house –
y trên cawl signals our break for lunch.
Who can know what insecurity and depression, what darkness so often filled Joseph’s mind? In his diaries, he often wrote that the fates were against him – ‘I am kicked like a football in this world’ – ‘I do feel that my life has become filled with sorrow and covered in darkness’. And he hated his inability to abstain from drink. In December 1868, he wrote that he could see no sense or meaning in this life – ‘I have lost my way… Life is nothing but a catalogue of misfortune’.
After Dark
And then he was gone,
Cors Caron’s peat piled high in the yard
against the coming winter.
By night he left
quietly –
Bont Ffrainc led him away
to walk the railway line north
to Tregaron station.
He entrained for Liverpool and
gained a berth:
Eurynome,
goddess of meadows and pastures
carried him to Melbourne
Nothing
was left beneath the black hill
but the river, the meadows, the pastures
and the wife
Ophir’s Bounty
Did he believe
as those twenty-five years passed,
did he believe
as the Ophir carried him north,
his wife, his children, his farm
had kept a welcome in their hearts.
Perhaps
it was enough that Trecefel
might once again come to know his hand.
But he believed that he had to return: he knew
his heart was too deeply rooted in the land of his birth
he must be buried in his Welsh soil.
I am indebted to:
Joseph Jenkins. Diary of a Welsh Swagman 1869-1894.
Edited by William Evans. Macmillan Australia, 1977
Bethan Phillips. Pity the Swagman: The Australian Odyssey of
a Victorian Diarist. Cymdeithas Lyfrau Ceredigian, 2002
G. had no idea what had woken him, what had brought him alert and fully awake to the bedroom window in his grandfather’s house in the middle of the night. The gibbous moon lit the garden a little from behind the drifting clouds and a summer breeze ruffled the hedgerow, but apart from that it was completely still and quiet. Now that he had moved to the window—quietly so as not to wake his brother—he felt wide awake and on this hot and stuffy night had no wish to return to his bed. He wondered what it was that he had heard. Had he heard something? He did not remember the sound but that seemed to be the thought in his mind as he found himself gazing out. He must have heard something or he would still be asleep—he didn’t usually wake up in the middle of the night. Despite the heat he shivered! Yesterday they had explored the farm again and he now felt that he knew every tree, gate, shed and path—particularly in the little garden that surrounded the cottage. A plan began to form in his mind and he looked out the window carefully examining every part of the garden he could see. Nothing moved. Carefully—very aware of the creaking stair—he crept out of the room, past his grandfather’s room with its open door, the door that would never close again because sometime years ago the old house had flexed its muscles before subsiding back to sleep and the door—or the frame—had warped. He remembered laughing when he had been told—Taid, houses don’t move—and his grandfather had just smiled that quiet smile of his. He reached the top of the stairs. Carefully, one step at a time, keeping his bare feet to the side of each step, he crept down, pushed open the stair door just as much as he had to and arrived in the kitchen. Despite the warm night the stone floor was cold and he tiptoed the few paces to the run of rush matting that led to the garden door. He was surprised at how rough it felt to his bare feet. Whatever had woken him, whatever the house felt now about stretching or yawning, everything was still and quiet. He opened the door quietly and slipped out.
So begins the first short story in my recent collection, When I Am Not Writing Poetry: Selected Short Stories. Just one story among 30 – some very short and some quite long… but like the others, I would suggest, (but then I would, wouldn’t I?) worth investigating, worth a further read! The book is available on Amazon.
Unknown reader, be glad that I have opened the door and let out
the dust of my verse for you to see an age after the words first found form on the screen, or
perhaps I have let in your imagination so, turning, you can see a single almond
blossom, pink amongst its pale russet leaves, to tempt your words out
Unknown traveller, on this day, stay, venture out
and, before they fade, gather memories of your Spring in fragrant vases around the room, so
your thoughts today can grace some future verses you may set out
Do not press and dry the blooms
… and it’s published! Much excitement at being able to announce the availability (Amazon or here) of my latest collection of poems, Lost Time.
Lost Time brings together a collection of poems written during the last two to three years. There are poems that relate to Place, the Sea (always a strong theme for me), Writing, Memories and Time… and a few poems brought about by Covid and lockdown found their way in at the beginning.
Brought together, the poems are (I suppose) exactly as described in the first of the 17 Life Tercets:
A story about
an old poet
and his cottage
We are at the proof-reading stage! Unusually, this has thrown up a couple of minor emendations which – in once case – are easily dealt with. The other is going to take a couple of attempts! The spine – on which would normally appear the author’s name and the title of the book is slim enough that only a small font will fit… so we are experimenting to try and get it as large as possible!
THEN… we will publish!
Nearly there! Really, really, nearly there!
Chorus
Chorus Chorus
Corona Sutra
The First Winter
Longing
Ystrad Fflur: Dusk
Uchtryd’s Summer Place
Evening Light
Autumn Rain
Legacy
Seeing Starlings with Will
Town
Seaside
The Estuary
Tides
Heatherslade
Innocence
Life Tercets
Sea Story
Shell
Thálassa, Thálassa
Et le feu s’éteignit sur la mer…
Dark Seas Dawning
Ex Libris
The Interface
A Memory of Night
Evening Poem
If Only the Sky Could Dream
Song of Summer
Winter Love
Winter White
A Report on the Memories Held in Rooms
After Leaving Another Adelstrop
Augury
Killing Time
The Elegies of Time
Unredeemable Time
Creation
The Departed
I have just finished curating a selection of my poems into my next collection – Lost Time, and am now pondering the idea of writing a short introduction. Maybe this will be its first draft! The poems are arranged through six themes:
Covid – Place – Sea – Writing – Memories – Time
although it would be fair to say, and intentional, that the edges to the themes are blurred. To the extent that during the process I have once or twice moved a poem from one section to another. It is also fair to say that the distant shadows of lost love and passing time hang over the entire collection – lightly, I hope.
Time has always fascinated me. Aristotle said that Time is the measurement of change and the idea that, as Professor Carlo Rovelli wrote (The Order of Time, Penguin, 2019) of Einstein’s fourth dimension, “time is memory” and again “time is ignorance” or even, somewhat philosophically, “we are time” was at least in part what underlies the long Elegies of Time which comes near the end of the book. But I will write more about that poem after the book has been published.
If you have been with me over a period of time that is long enough for you to have at least dipped into my other writings, you will have come across my ‘fixation’ with the horizon, a fixation which I have always ascribed to my time at sea. Interestingly, I learn that Heidegger identifies the internal consciousness of time as the horizon of being itself. I like that: in a simplistic way I have seen myself as standing at the horizon (I know, I know – you cannot stand at the horizon as – like an understanding of time – as you move towards it, it remains distant from you)… seen myself as standing at that magical line that does not exist, with my future flowing towards me and my past dropping away behind me over the horizon.
So, Lost Time: a few angry or resigned poems about Covid. Then, moving into the collection, place – mostly Wales but not entirely so – gives way to the largest group – poems about or reflecting the sea. Beyond their horizon (horizons?), you come to poems about writing and about memories, which seem to lead – at least in my mind – to poems on time. The light-hearted Killing Time (which is prefixed, appropriately enough, with a quotation from Rainer Maria Rilke, The Duino Elegies: “For staying is nowhere”) is about waiting to go into the auditorium from a theatre cafe, and leads into the long five-part Elegies of Time. Unredeemable Time picks up the theme and the short Creation combines time with earlier themes: memory and writing. The Departed makes a fitting end to both the theme and the collection.