Following on from the short February 4th ‘Miracles’ poem with it’s ‘time’ theme, another poem that recognises the variability of time!
Tick, tock, distant star
How I wonder when you are
Just a timepiece in the sky
Your every ‘now’ another lie!
As a writer – possibly even a poet – I have concerns about the Large Language Models (LLM) of Artificial Intelligence. As Robert Griffiths wrote recently in PNR 281:
“But even if these programs could train on ‘good’ poetry, it is not clear how, in their production of what is statistically most likely in a word-string, they could produce anything original. It is not obvious that any analysis of the best poetry written before 1915 would have come up with the third line of Prufrock [“Like a patient etherized upon a table” since you ask]. That line was not already waiting in that poetry; it was not even waiting in language.’
Crucially he reminded readers that it arose “from a particular human being’s unique relationship to that poetry and the world.”
This echoed a part of something I wrote about a month ago. I too have concerns about AI producing art, fiction and poems for that very reason. AI used for necessary processes – such as NHS image scanning to speed up analysis and consultations – is a wonderful step forward. Unnecessary AI simply to make money for the lazy is not. In essence my concerns boil down to three issues which I have classified as to do with morality, followed by three further issues:
Around me, the unseen miracle
Of the past: the birds in the tree—the hills—the clouds—the people passing by,
I am at the centre of my time
And they are all in the past
What stranger miracles are there?
After Walt Whitman:
To me the sea is a continual miracle,
The fishes that swim—the rocks—the motion of the waves—the ships with men in them,
What stranger miracles are there?
A Haiku
Golden sunsets streak
Cloudy skies over the sea
A lost horizon
Mid month
as a good a time as any other
to write of howling winds that smother
Every hint
of comfort and the daily norms
to replace them all with Darragh’s storms
Which break
the trees which crash and fall upon
wires, and thus: the village power has gone
And then
in every room in every country cottage
is darkness from the lack of wattage
No heating
warms, no ovens cook, no hobs to boil
and freezers let their contents spoil
Crouched around
wood burning stoves we try to read
by candlelight, wondering how to feed
On anything
that isn’t cake, or bread and cheese
or how to boil water for our teas
The luxury
of an old potato baked in the embers
(a boy scout’s trick my mind remembers)
Barely makes
a meal but is a change from more cold food:
stale bread, cheese with pickle slowly chewed
Deadlines pass
with no heat or glimmer of a friendly light
and then no power to warm my bed at night
Till suddenly,
hours before the last deadline, a sudden shock –
lights and heating are back in stock
The following titles remain available:
The Dark Trilogy
When I Am Not Writing Poetry (short stories)
Mostly Welsh (early poems)
Book of the Spirit (poems)
Lost Time (poems)
Please let me know (via ‘Contact’ – top menu) if you have a problem with making payments through the site shop – alternatively use Amazon.
Thanks, Chris
I have just discovered that the short story published in Storgy which was available on their web site is no longer accessible. It is available in When I Am Not Writing Poetry, but as it used to be available electronically – and it is very short – I thought that I would reproduce it here.
The Tenements Bus Stop
She told me she loved me. She whispered it. She breathed in my ear. She brushed my lips and breathed into my mouth. We hugged and she pressed against me. I could feel her body against mine. She kissed me and I found myself responding, my lips against hers. Briefly her tongue flickered and pushed into my mouth before withdrawing. Of course I told her I loved her and held her tightly, urgently. My hands exploring—daringly I thought, until her impatient hands moved mine. Her hands… quickly, she whispered. And then I saw it: we came out from behind the bus shelter and I boarded the bus back to Sauchiehall Street, to the stop outside the cafe where she worked—my photo has my number on the back, she had said and crossed the road to her Dad’s tenement block. So, we parted, I was still nineteen and still ignorant; I travelled back alone to rejoin my ship. I never saw Baillieston or her again.
In the abyss
between language and meaning
the crease of intent
is shelved with
volumes bound in leather
each embossed
in gold
And when you
have selected,
dust, no… polish each
with the softest
white vapour;
care for the interstices
that lie between its words;
consider the colours
and shades of nuance;
search out the drifts
and shivers of significance—
do not embrace,
do not grasps greedily
but use them tenderly
feeling for the perfect edge
which, with great love of locution,
I honed. Only
then will you know my sense
and each allusion sense and sense
allusion
… about an algorithm that recommends your own book – the book that you have written – for you to buy!
How often are we told how clever are these algorithms? How they improve your online experience? Keep your children away from the stuff you wouldn’t want them to see?
I have an author page on Amazon and all of my books are linked to it. Wouldn’t you have thought that the algorithm would recognise the same name – Chris Armstrong – on both the product being recommended and the recipient of the recommendation… and if it was still in doubt, check for an author page for confirmation?
It doesn’t give me much hope for algorithms!
Congratulations if you have stuck with me through this marathon – we have today reached the final, the 30th, short story in my collection When I Am Not Writing Poetry. Welcome to ‘A Writer’s Life’.
Once I had an uncle – before he died in Africa when I was a toddler – and once he had a fiancée. This long short story – almost a novella – tells the story of neither of them: it is a fictional account of the birth of a writer: the birth of this writer. It blends fact and fiction, places with which I have been familiar throughout my life with other imagined homes, and real characters with imagined characters. It is an account that interweaves some elements of real lives with an awful lot of fiction. It is a story…
When the news reached him he was sitting at his desk and did not immediately take in the full import of what he heard. He had been constructing, if that is the right word, another version of himself that would suit the narrative he had in mind (his initial plans were rarely on paper), a version that would be him in all but name, have his history—or a version of it—but a figure from which he could distance himself in order to look down on, to judge, his actions. At once him and a remote almost alien figure. It would be a tricky balancing act. As he stared at the blank page it occurred to him that he needed the familiarity of his life but did not want his readers—would he ever have readers?—to recognise him in that history. He wondered what he was hiding from… or perhaps he was not so much hiding as disguising his need for a real life as his source. He thought that if he was to be his alter ego, he must be the writer or poet born in Wales that he had never been: perhaps a miner for a father and a teacher as his mother. A father who read avidly in the Institute every night, often returning home late—probably when they threw him out and closed up—to too little sleep before another hard day beneath the ground. It struck him as absurd that, at work, his father was often a few hundred feet directly below his mother, and he wondered if either of them had ever had the same thought.
If he was turning his father into the educated, albeit self-educated late in life, parent he wondered if too he was robbing his mother of the education that she had never pursued.
‘ A Writer’s Life’ and all the other short stories that I have introduce over the last month can be found in When I Am Not Writing Poetry – available here or on Amazon.