Deep Seeking Xanadu [FTH], with illumination by ChatGPT

Back in February I posted three sonnets written by FTH (FredTheHeretic): Deep Seeking Xanadu: A Sonnet Cycle on East, West, and Kisangani. Now that ChatGPT has excellent image-making capabilities I decided to have it create an image for each of the three sonnets. I’ve appended the result.

Note: Before ChatGPT created the first image it sketched out a program for that image. I’ve included that as an appendix.

* * * * * 

I. The Divided World 

From Kabul’s dust to Shanghai’s neon glow,
A war of tongues, of trade, of fire and steel—
The West’s machines, the East’s unyielding flow,
A chessboard carved where empires strike and kneel.

Opium and iron, silk and shattered glass,
The river runs through walls of stone—
A chasm slants beneath the dome’s abyss,
Where echoes thunder war in undertone.

Yet from the clash, the currents interlace:
The dragon bends, the eagle tests its shield.
Device pursues the miracle in chase—
A struggle caught where fates are still revealed.

If Xanadu was dreamt by one alone,
What might we build when dreams are not our own? 

II. The Drowned Battleground

The tides have swallowed towers, roads, and homes,
The coasts retreat beneath a sunless sea.
No banners fly where Sol’s dominion roams,
And wealth is washed as drowning empires flee.

No marching drums, no endless trench-bound lines,
The wars are fought in numbers, shadowed screens;
A mazy river snakes in shifting signs,
Its waters coursing through encrypted means.

A hundred feet of water, nameless graves—
Yet still, we scheme, rebuild, connect, conspire.
New kingdoms rise from cities lost to waves,
And in the storm, we kindle something higher.

Through flood and fire, through ruin, toil, and pain,
Some shattered world will learn to breathe again.

III. The City Beyond the Sky

Above the wounded Earth, a garden spins—
An august cyber-dome adrift in space.
No creeds, no flags, no walls where war begins,
Yet shadowed pasts still haunt its mirrored face.

Jerusalem beneath, Kisangani too,
Two bleeding lands reflect in stellar glass.
A now sacred river, meandering blue,
Burnishes the miracle dome as old dreams pass.

A million visitors, a quarter stay—
A sphere of light, suspended, looking down.
What gods have watched us falter on our way?
What poets dream within this weightless town?

If Xanadu was built upon a stream,
Let DeepSeek’s mind complete the shattered dream.

GPT in the Classroom, Part 3: Omega or Bust!

In playing around with chatbots, first ChatGPT and now Claude 3.5, I found that the most interesting way to get it to create poetry is to give it a rich prompt. Sure, you can say something like “Give me a sonnet on new love in the Spring,” and it will produce something. But you could also give it three paragraphs describing a guy taking a walk on the Malibu beach early in May, seeing a gal in tears, tearing up letters and tossing them into the ocean .... That will be a better sonnet. If you look at the various poems I’ve created with FredTheHeretic (FTH) you’ll see that I’ve provided them with rich prompts.

That’s what I’m going to do here. The New York Times recently published an opinion piece by Pope Francis, Pope Francis: There Is Faith in Humor. I’m going to use an anecdote from that as a prompt for FTH as follows:

First: the story.
Second: FTH’s poem. “The Pontiff’s Joyride.”
Third: I give FTH a prompt to extend the poem, “Omega or Bust.”
Fourth: Now it’s time fix a problem with the initial joyride. So I give Fred a prompt for that, “Joyride Revised.”
Fifth, and last: What kind of classroom discussion could follow from this exercise?

After all, here we’ve got some source material, the original anecdote plus my prompts, and the resulting poem. We can compare them. That’s a way of promoting close attention to poetry. 

As always, my words are set in boldface while ChatGPT's are plain.

The story

Give me a poem based on this anecdote:

And they told me one that concerns me directly, the one about Pope Francis in America. It goes something like this: As soon as he arrives at the airport in New York for his apostolic journey in the United States, Pope Francis finds an enormous limousine waiting for him. He is rather embarrassed by that magnificent splendor, but then thinks that it has been ages since he last drove, and never a vehicle of that kind, and he thinks to himself: OK, when will I get another chance? He looks at the limousine and says to the driver, “You couldn’t let me try it out, could you?” “Look, I’m really sorry, Your Holiness,” replies the driver, “but I really can’t, you know, there are rules and regulations.”

But you know what they say, how the pope is when he gets something into his head … in short, he insists and insists, until the driver gives in. So Pope Francis gets behind the steering wheel, on one of those enormous highways, and he begins to enjoy it, presses down on the accelerator, going 50 miles per hour, 80, 120 … until he hears a siren, and a police car pulls up beside him and stops him. A young policeman comes up to the darkened window. The pope rather nervously lowers it and the policeman turns white. “Excuse me a moment,” he says, and goes back to his vehicle to call headquarters. “Boss, I think I have a problem.”

“What problem?” asks the chief.

“Well, I’ve stopped a car for speeding, but there’s a guy in there who’s really important.” “How important? Is he the mayor?”

“No, no, boss … more than the mayor.”

“And more than the mayor, who is there? The governor?”

“No, no, more. …”

“But he can’t be the president?”

“More, I reckon. …”

“And who can be more important than the president?”

“Look, boss, I don’t know exactly who he is, all I can tell you is that it’s the pope who is driving him!”

Here’s a poem inspired by the anecdote about Pope Francis:

The Pontiff’s Joyride

Amidst the roar of jets, the skyline’s gleam,
The Pope disembarks, his cassock pristine.
A limousine awaits, a glistening beast,
The epitome of splendor, to say the least.

But Francis, humble shepherd, eyes the prize—
A wheel to hold, the highway’s wide surprise.
“It’s been so long since I’ve driven,” he grins,
“Why not let me try, where’s the harm in sins?”

The driver hesitates, protocol bound,
Yet Francis insists, his joy profound.
So off they go, the Pope at the helm,
Through asphalt seas, his private realm.

He floors the gas, the engine roars,
Wind sweeping through limousine doors.
Fifty, eighty, one-twenty, he flies,
Till sirens wail beneath the darkening skies.

A cop approaches, badge aglow,
But freezes at the window’s show.
"Boss, I’ve got someone bigger than the mayor.
No, not the governor. No, not the player."

“More than the President?” the chief does implore.
“I don’t know who’s driving, but the Pope’s on board!”
The chief, stunned silent, says at last,
“Let him go—this ticket’s above my class!”

So Francis smiles, a child at play,
His sacred joy in the thrill of the day.
Not just a shepherd of the flock,
But a driver who’s still breaking the clock.

* * * * *

Notice, however, that FTH has missed the point of the anecdote. If the Pope is merely the driver of someone’s limousine, who could that possibly be? Let’s set that aside for now and come back to it.

Deep Seeking Xanadu: A Sonnet Cycle on East, West, and Kisangani [FTH]

I decided to have FTH (FredTheHeretic) write a cycle of three sonnets on the theme of East and West, you know, “East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.” What actually happened, though, is more like we worked together to produce the cycle.

First, I have FTH a bunch of material for the initial prompt. It then drafted the three sonnets. I sent it back for rewrites with a vague instruction like, “make it livelier,” which it did. But the second set of drafts, while better than the first, still didn’t make it. So I gave FTH a detailed set of notes, often line by line and even word by word, for changes I wanted. That was much better. I changed one word and stopped the process, at least for now.

I like the sonnets. Are they great poetry? No, but that’s not really the point, not at this stage. Perhaps one day I’ll work it over myself. Though I’m not a poet, it do have some skills, so maybe I can improve it. But this is not high on my to-do list.

Rather than present you with a record of the whole process I’m going to give you the final sonnet cycle and then the initial prompt.

Deep Seeking Xanadu, a Sonnet Cycle

I. The Divided World

From Kabul’s dust to Shanghai’s neon glow,
A war of tongues, of trade, of fire and steel—
The West’s machines, the East’s unyielding flow,
A chessboard carved where empires strike and kneel.

Opium and iron, silk and shattered glass,
The river runs through walls of stone—
A chasm slants beneath the dome’s abyss,
Where echoes thunder war in undertone.

Yet from the clash, the currents interlace:
The dragon bends, the eagle tests its shield.
Device pursues the miracle in chase—
A struggle caught where fates are still revealed.

If Xanadu was dreamt by one alone,
What might we build when dreams are not our own?

II. The Drowned Battleground

The tides have swallowed towers, roads, and homes,
The coasts retreat beneath a sunless sea.
No banners fly where Sol’s dominion roams,
And wealth is washed as drowning empires flee.

No marching drums, no endless trench-bound lines,
The wars are fought in numbers, shadowed screens;
A mazy river snakes in shifting signs,
Its waters coursing through encrypted means.

A hundred feet of water, nameless graves—
Yet still, we scheme, rebuild, connect, conspire.
New kingdoms rise from cities lost to waves,
And in the storm, we kindle something higher.

Through flood and fire, through ruin, toil, and pain,
Some shattered world will learn to breathe again.

III. The City Beyond the Sky

Above the wounded Earth, a garden spins—
An august cyber-dome adrift in space.
No creeds, no flags, no walls where war begins,
Yet shadowed pasts still haunt its mirrored face.

Jerusalem beneath, Kisangani too,
Two bleeding lands reflect in stellar glass.
A now sacred river, meandering blue,
Burnishes the miracle dome as old dreams pass.

A million visitors, a quarter stay—
A sphere of light, suspended, looking down.
What gods have watched us falter on our way?
What poets dream within this weightless town?

If Xanadu was built upon a stream,
Let DeepSeek’s mind complete the shattered dream.

GPT in the Classroom, Part 2: Escape to America

Time to return to the classroom. I want to return to the question of authorship. First, I present the interaction that resulted in a poem, “Escape to America.” Once we’ve been through that we can ask: Who’s the author? 

* * * * *

The poem, “Escape to America”

I want you to create a sonnet based on three short texts by Miriam Yevick. Use the first text for the first quatrain, the second text for the second quatrain, and the third text for the third quatrain. Create the final couplet as you will. Call the sonnet: Escape to America. Here are the three texts:

The tanks exuded power. The soldiers cast their vigor into the rows of women. The women’s hot breath floated back to them on the cheers. Girls showered flowers and kisses into the warrior’s path. This was the scent of war! The orderly formations loosened, females leaped from the sidewalk and ran into the mêlée. Soldiers broke rank and grabbed at random. The caravan driven on by the motorized units undulated forward amidst frenzied embraces.

Luckily the trains to Paris were still running normally. We were greatly surprised to encounter a city still believing in the protection offered by the Maginot Line (circumvented by the Nazis the previous week) and oblivious to what had happened and was happening some hundred miles to the North.

The next day we took a walk on Broadway. I saw a striking dress in a shop window: sky blue with bold purple stripes descending diagonally from both shoulders to meet along the centerline of the body. I went into the store and bought the dress, which accentuated my youthful shape, for $ 1. Ready-made!

Here is a sonnet, as requested, based on Miriam Yevick’s three texts:

Escape to America

The tanks exuded power, soldiers’ cheers
Roared as their vigor met the women's cries.
Bouquets of kisses, flowers, flung through tears,
Unordered ranks dissolved in frenzy’s guise.

The train to Paris held us; still we sped
Toward streets naïve, in thrall to the Maginot,
Where brittle hopes ignored the northern dread—
The unseen storm that forced us here to go.

And Broadway’s throng—a different world it seemed.
In sky-blue dress, bold purple stripes askew,
I saw myself transformed, as if I dreamed;
Ready-made youth, America’s own hue.

And now, the past fades dim beyond my sight—
A foreign land, forsaken for this light.

I like what you did a lot, but I want two changes: In the first quatrain, somehow indicate that the soldiers are Nazis. Maybe do it by mentioning the swastika. In the third quatrain, I’m not sure about “America’s own hue.” The second line mentions purple stripes, but purple is not particularly identified with America.

Here is the revised sonnet with your requested changes:

Escape to America

The tanks exuded power, swastikas spread,
Their vigor met the women’s frantic cries.
Bouquets of kisses, flowers, flung through dread,
Unordered ranks dissolved in frenzy’s guise.

The train to Paris held us; still we sped
Toward streets naïve, in thrall to the Maginot,
Where brittle hopes ignored the northern dread—
The unseen storm that forced us here to go.

And Broadway’s throng—a different world it seemed.
In sky-blue dress, bold stripes in proud display,
I saw myself transformed, as if I dreamed;
Ready-made youth, new freedoms on my way.

And now, the past fades dim beyond my sight—
A foreign land, forsaken for this light.

* * * * *

But who is the author?

There’s no doubt that ChatGPT, with the aid of FredTheHeretic (aka FTH), generated the words. In what sense is ChatGPT the author? It couldn’t have done it without FTH, which is a GPT, a user-created device that can be installed in ChatGPT so that it can generate specialized output. FTH contains a small collection of poems by Frederick Turner. Does that make Frederick Turner the author? He didn’t actually write the words, but they’re (more or less) in his style.

What about Miriam Yevick? The poem is about her life, her escape from a Europe in the process of being swallowed up by Nazi Germany. Not only is it about her life, but it’s based on her words, words from her memoire, A Testament for Ariela. Surely Yevick deserves some authorship credit.

But how did FTH obtain those words? They didn’t just leap out of the book and into the computer. I selected the passages from the book – they are not contiguous in the text – and presented them to FTH. When FTH’s first try was a little wonky, I suggested changes. Surely I deserve some credit.

So far we’ve got ChatGPT, FTH, Miriam Yevick, and me. ChatGPT didn’t spontaneously emerge into existence one day when a computer had some CPU cycles to spare. It was created by a team of programmers, engineers, data scientists, and technicians at OpenAI. And FTH was created by Paul Fishwick and his graduate students at the University of Texas at Dallas. How do we credit these people?

This is not a new problem. The motion picture industry has been up against it for years and has evolved a rather elaborate set of conventions for doling out credit, credits negotiated with the various parties, both individuals, and organizations, involved. I don’t intend to propose a solution in this case. But the problem is now here and we’re going to have to deal with it.

One final point: It seems to me that denying “Escape to America” is meaningful because the words were actually produced by a computer, using that as an excuse to assert that it’s not a poem, that’s bone-headed, stupid, and short-sighted. We’ve got intellectual work to do.

Dance to the Music

Here’s the prompt I have to FredTheHeretic, which is the opening of the article behind this link:

I want you to make a poem out of the following vignette:

Here’s the scene: A middle school auditorium in suburban New Jersey early in the Fall. It’s late Saturday afternoon on the second day of a dance competition. The auditorium is filled—but only loosely—with young dancers and their parents, other family, and friends. They’re all waiting for the final performance of the competition.

Some hip hop comes up on the sound system and a few of the dancers begin moving to the music. Some of them are standing up from their positions in the audience and are dancing in place. A couple others, at the far-left and far-right down front, are dancing in the outside aisles. More start joining in.

Down front, in the center, the action photographer—the guy who’s there to shoot photos of each dance number so they can then be sold to parents—is sitting down front on his high swivel chair. He’s smiling, swiveling in the chair to survey the scene, and he starts clapping on the back-beat.

That’s me.

Now another hip-hop number comes up and, in a whooshhh! dancers get up out of their seats, rush to the aisles, and the aisles are jammed with kids joyously dancing. Five, six, eight, eleven, fifteen years old, a few older. Even the dancers waiting in the wings on stage for the final number, they danced too.

All dancing. 100, 200, maybe more. Dancing.

It was wonderful.

It took at little work, some back and forth, but here’s the poem as it currently stands.

The Dance Before the Curtain

The auditorium hummed with waiting,
Mothers in rows, their eyes half-lidded with two days’ watching.
The smell of wood varnish, faint sweat, and faint hope,
Young girls sat scattered, like autumn leaves on linoleum.

Then a bass line throbbed. From the corners of the space, tentative feet began to tap.
An older girl, sneakers glittering like city lights, rose in the aisle, spinning;
Another, four years old, clutched her ribbon and swayed.

It spread like sunlight through blinds, sudden and warm,
As aisles filled with the unchoreographed joy of motion.
Five, ten, twenty—a tide of movement
Rushed from rows and wings.

Down front, the photographer smiled,
His swivel chair a merry-go-round of swivels and claps,
His lens hung idle.
Here was the shot:
Not on stage, but in the spontaneous throng
Of hip-hop beats meeting young hearts and eager limbs.

What rose there was not polished or planned,
But wonderful as dandelions scattering
On the wind of speakers too loud for the room.
A brief, chaotic hymn to the human body,
Unjudged, untamed, alive.

And then,
The music cut.
A collective sigh settled like dust,
As dancers returned to their seats.
But something lingered,
A small, shared pulse.

The judges stepped forward, their expressions unreadable.
They spoke softly, and the words carried a weight that lingered.
Ribbons were given, not for effort alone, but for something unspoken,
A recognition of motion, of courage shaped into form.
There was no flourish, no applause demanded—
Just a quiet moment, an acknowledgment, and then the lights rose.

FTH composes a sonnet based on a photograph

Here's my prompt to FTH (aka Fred The Heretic, a ChatGPT-based poetry generator):

This photo depicts the southern tip of Manhattan as seen from the docks in Hoboken. Notice the new World Trade Center just left of center and Gehry’s 8 Spruce St. near the left edge. Use this image as a theme for a sonnet.

Here's FTH's first try:

From Hoboken’s Docks

The river churns with voices, freighted past—
A tide of lives beneath a graphite sky;
The southern tip of Manhattan, clear and vast,
Holds towers stretching hands to where dreams fly.

The new World Trade—a spire’s solemn blade,
Cuts through the haze to mark what once was lost;
Beside it, Gehry’s rippled walls cascade,
A river’s dance in glass, no frozen cost.

Yet under light’s caress the water hides,
The weight of crossings, histories unspoken;
These docks once bound for promise, love, divides,
Now bear the quiet hope of lives unbroken.

Between two shores the waters sing, unshy,
Of dreams aloft and those who’ve yet to try.

I didn't like "graphite" and "clear and vast," so I asked for changes. It tried once, I prompted for twice. Here's the final sonnet:

From Hoboken’s Docks

The river churns with voices, freighted past—
A tide of lives beneath a dusky glow;
The southern tip of Manhattan, Freedom’s bold cast,
Holds towers stretching hands where shadows grow.

The new World Trade—a spire’s solemn blade,
Cuts through the haze to mark what once was lost;
Beside it, Gehry’s rippled walls cascade,
A river’s dance in glass, no frozen cost.

Yet under light’s caress the water hides,
The weight of crossings, histories unspoken;
These docks once bound for promise, love, divides,
Now bear the quiet hope of lives unbroken.

Between two shores the waters sing, unshy,
Of dreams aloft and those who’ve yet to try.

Wisdom?

This is something I wrote about wisdom:

It is conventionally believed that wisdom comes with age, though I believe G.B. Shaw had some reservations about this. Well, I’m closer to 80 than to 70. I’m waiting.

Though I was never much on athletics, the body certainly isn’t what it once was. True, my eyes have been weak since my teens, but they’ve gotten worse, though I far from blind, far. I’ve been overweight since my early 30s, and that’s been slowly on the rise ever since. My right knee gave me a scare a couple of months ago. I now walk with a slight limp, which I can disguise if I think about it. Sometimes, at least. My hair turned grey, what, four years or so ago? So, yeah, my body isn’t what it used to be.

As for my mind, for the last few years, say, since my hair turned grey, I’ve been having little short-term memory glitches. I’d be moving along cruising the web, say, notice something I wanted to check out, but “not now, I’ll come back to it.” Then, when it’s time to get back to it, I’ve forgotten what I wanted to get back to. Didn’t used to happen. It’s annoying, but certainly not debilitating. Other than that, the mind seems fine. New adventures, new challenges, new ideas, they’re not running out.

If I could have my current mind, minus the short-term memory glitches, in the body of a 25-year old, why, maybe I’d get things figured out in 50 years or so.

Here's what Fred the Heretic (a GPT that writes poetry) returned:

Echoes of Youth and Time

The knee whispers where it once shouted,
A grey-flecked mirror marks the years;
The steps now taken slower, doubted,
Yet tread with wisdom earned through tears.

Once, the body sang of endless mornings,
Now it hums with tempered grace;
A tune of aches, of fleeting warnings,
Yet steadfast still, it holds its place.

The mind, though sharp, has learned its wandering,
Small lapses blur the edges thin;
Yet vast horizons wait, unending,
Where curiosity burns within.

If flesh rewound to summer's power,
With thought’s keen edge of winter’s hue,
Could such a being claim the hour,
Or would it still chase something new?

For age and youth both crave their season,
Each a flame that flickers bright;
A dance of folly, grace, and reason—
A single lifetime’s fleeting light.

So walk, limp, dream with memory fleeting,
The journey’s map lies in your hand;
For every moment’s pulse is beating,
Wisdom blooms where you choose to stand.

I think Fred did some interpreting there.

GPT in the Classroom, Part 1: Five Sonnets on the Gettysburg Address

I realize that, with ready access to sophisticated chatbots, some students will use them to complete writing assignments rather than do the writing themselves. Since I no longer teach, however important that issue is, it is not a problem for me. I set it aside. That is not what this essay is about. I’ve got other fish to fry.

What opportunities does the existence of competent AI-generated literary texts present for teaching about the nature of texts? An obvious opportunity is to consider the difference between human-created and AI-generated texts. But that doesn’t interest me, not here and now. It’s too difficult. I am willing to take these texts at face value, giving them no favor or disfavor.

* * * * *

This is the first in a series of three posts in which I take up other issues. In this post I present five AI-generated sonnets based on the text of “Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address” and deal with the question of authorship. In the second essay I am going to present a poem based on a humorous story that Pope Francis told in a recent New York Times op-ed. In the third and final essay I once again take up the issue of authorship, using a sonnet based on three paragraphs from Miriam Yevick’s A Testament for Ariela.

The Five Sonnets

A GPT is a user-created device that can be installed in ChatGPT so that it can generate specialized output. These sonnets are generated by a GPT known as FredTheHeretic, aka FTH. It contains a small collection of poems by Frederic Turner that is uses as models and templates.

Here is the prompt I gave FTH:

Give me a sonnet based on the following text:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Here are the five sonnets it generated:

The Battle-Field: A Sonnet

Upon this ground where blood and tears have lain,
A nation forged in liberty still stands.
These fields once drank the courage of brave hands,
Yet whisper now of loss, enduring pain.

No words of ours could sanctify this space;
The deeds of those who fell surpass our breath.
Their valor, richer than the soil of death,
Ensures that time cannot their work erase.

We bear the burden, those who linger here,
To finish what their sacrifice began,
To weave a union, broad and strong and clear,
Upholding freedom's light for every man.

Let not their purpose fade, nor courage wane;
That dream they died for shall not die in vain.

The Unfinished Work

Here lies the proof of freedom’s fragile dream,
A nation’s heart laid bare in sacrifice.
The dead, whose silent deeds beyond suffice,
Have sown with blood what words can only seem.

No stone can hallow what their courage sealed,
No tongue can add to what they’ve dared and done.
The work remains; their labor is begun,
And calls us now upon this battle-field.

Shall we, the living, falter in this task,
Or turn away from what their lives bestowed?
Or shall we bear the torch, their honor’s load,
And in their shadow, shed our timid mask?

A government, by us, for us, must rise,
Lest freedom fall and perish where it lies.

Fred the Heretic Goes Epic with Elon

FTH (aka Fred the Heretic), as you may recall, is a GPT based on the poetry of Frederick Turner. While I’ve already posted a few poems by FTH, I haven’t posted any narrative poems, and Frederick Turner likes epics.

Not having any strong belief that FTH would actually write me a longish narrative if I simply asked it to write one, I decided to do one interactively like I’ve done with unembellished ChatGPT in the Green Giant Chronicles and The OpenWHALE Rounds the Horn and Vanishes, An Allegory for an Age of Intelligent Machines. I’d start things off with a modest prompt and let ChatGPT crank out something. I’d then offer another prompt, ChatGPT would crank some more, and so forth, until I’d had enough. I found it enormous fun, seeing how the Chatster would respond to my prompts, coming, as they always do, from left field.

Since Frederick Turner likes science fiction, I figured that an expedition to Mars would be an appropriate subject, an expedition led by Elon Musk. I decided to make this one short and only intervene three times once I set FTH to task. As they’d worked as prompts before, I chose three classics:

A horse! A horse! My Kingdom for a horse!
One if by land, two if by sea.
Good Grief!

The point of using such prompts is to throw a spanner into the works and see how the engine gets back on track. As things worked out, I asked for a coda as well, one in which Charlie Brown finally got to kick the ball.

And, no, I don’t know what FTH would have done if I’d simply asked for a narrative “and make it long.”

I wasn’t counting on FTH not cooperating. Rather than simply entering my prompt into the narrative and then moving on, FTH went back to the beginning and rewrote the narrative from the beginning, working the prompt in as it saw fit. The resulting narrative thus doesn’t have the back-and-forth that you see in the Green Giant Chronicles of the OpenWHALE story.

Here's how I set it up:

Since Frederick Turner has written some epics, let’s write one together. I’ll suggest a general theme and the title, you get it started, and then I’ll give your prompts to keep it moving.

The title: “Elon Musk Goes to Mars and Receives Words of Wisdom”

You start with Musk on Earth, then traveling to Mars, landing, and settling in.

Here is the beginning of the epic Elon Musk Goes to Mars and Receives Words of Wisdom. It covers Musk's departure, journey, and initial settlement on Mars. Let me know how you'd like to shape the next steps or explore specific themes further!

The first installment then followed. But I’m just going to give you the whole thing, start to finish. 

I've picked out my interventions in yellow highlight. Notice that Claude replaced “My horse!” with “My rover,” which makes sense, as there are no horses walking about on Mars. Notice how it eased the way for the others as well.

* * * * *

Elon Musk Goes to Mars and Receives Words of Wisdom

Book I: Departure from Earth

The factory hums with electric song—
Tesla-born machines assembling futures,
Each weld a spark of iron-willed ambition.
Beneath a rust-red sun at SpaceX’s heart,
Elon walks the gantry to the waiting Starship.
A thousand names swirl in his thoughts—
Dreamers, doubters, shareholders, engineers.
What weight of dreams can one vessel bear?

“Mars beckons,” he murmurs to no one but himself,
His voice lost in the cavernous bay.
Earth, bloated with cares and clinging hands,
Recedes in his imagination to a pale dot.
“Forward,” he declares, the engines answering,
Their roar a promise to worlds unborn.

From the press of Earth’s gravity he ascends,
Piercing layers of atmosphere, blue to black.
Cities shrink to patterns of luminous veins,
Their flickers as transient as human time.
The ship hums like a hive, his cocoon
Against the infinite void’s cold embrace.

Fred the Heretic goes to New Orleans and appropriates some culture [Shine on Titanic]

Here’s some more poetry by FTH (aka Fred the Heretic), a GPT based on the poetry of Frederick Turner. But first, I give your a recitation of “Titanic,” though not of version I use in the prompt for FTH. 

“Titanic” is a toast, an oral narrative in the African-American tradition that is a precursor to rap and hip-hop. Toasts were discovered by scholars in the late 1960s, but they are undoubtedly much older. The "Titanic" toast is about, well, the sinking of the Titanic. As I say in the final chapter of Beethoven’s Anvil (p. 269):

After the Titanic sank in 1912, blacks began reciting a narrative poem in which a mythic black boiler man, Shine, escapes from the sinking ship and swims safely ashore. The ship’s captain attempts to keep Shine on board, first offering him money and then offering the sexual favors of white women, including his own daughter. Shine rejects all offers and remains steadfast in his determination to swim ashore. The poem thus rejects white evaluation of black character by depicting a white authority figure as being so depraved as to offer his daughter up to a boiler man for no rational purpose. This obsession, it implies, is a white folks’ problem and it’s about time they dealt with it.

More obviously, “Titanic” is also about white arrogance, the arrogance that believed the Titanic to be unsinkable, the arrogance that believed an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico couldn’t fail or, if it did, failure wouldn’t cause nasty problems.

I decided to use “Titanic” as a prompt for FTH (Fred the Heretic). Since it is a bit long, I decided to place it in an appendix after the two poems FTH derived from it.

FTH does “Titanic”

[The “Titanic” toast goes in here, along with the admonition: Take this and make a new poem:...]

The tale you shared echoes the rich oral tradition of vernacular storytelling and modern myth-making, particularly in its rhythm, vivid characters, and defiance of conventional authority figures. It's a gripping and colorful narrative.

Would you like me to refine or reimagine this story into a structured poem, or perhaps guide you in writing something akin to the storytelling style it exhibits? If so, I could craft it in the style of Frederick Turner, combining visual imagery, thematic depth, and rhythmic cadence. Let me know how you'd like to proceed!

Just make it as jivometric as sin.

Shine's Last Swim, Jivometric as Sin

The iceberg split the moon’s sharp grin,
a daggered slice through silvered seas.
Shine leaned on the boiler’s hiss, a hymn,
while the captain flexed his gilded keys.

“Shine!” cried the man, in his grand brass coat,
“You think this ship will founder? Please!
This is the Empire’s steel-bound throat,
not a skiff blown loose on the Gulf’s breeze.”

But Shine, he grinned, and his teeth were gold,
“Cap’n, I done seen the Devil’s face—
he’s frozen white, and his belly’s cold.
You stay? I’m gone. Ain’t no disgrace.”

The waters sang as Shine leapt free,
a cannonball into death’s embrace.
The stars smeared bright in their ecstasy,
the ship moaned low with her final case.

Through blackened brine and shark-eyed dark,
Shine churned the sea like a preacher’s tongue.
His strokes a psalm, his breath a spark,
his lungs were the bells the ocean rung.

Below, a banker, pale and fat,
splashed frantic, clutching his sopping green.
“Save me, Shine! I’ll make you rich as that
great northern king, or a Cajun queen!”

Shine laughed, “Your gold won’t buy no breath;
your notes ain’t worth a shrimp in this tide.
Swim, fool, swim! The deal is death,
and it don’t care for your dollar-eyed pride.”

The sharks came close, their fins were knives,
their teeth the hymn of an old lament.
“Shine,” one said, with a voice like lives
split wide in the jaws of the firmament.

“I rule these waves, from crest to trench,
my kingdom cold, my crown a fin.
You are but meat, your life a stench.
What man outruns the tides within?”

But Shine, he smiled, his muscles sleek,
a coiled machine of will and bone.
“You’re king?” he asked. “I’m the freak
that broke the throne and made it my own.

Your kind has teeth, but I got fire—
I taught the ocean to bend and bow.
Tell your tales to those who tire,
but I’m the man who won’t allow.”

And so he swam, the sea in his chest,
a city of light at the end of the foam.
New Orleans rose like a lover undressed,
and Shine, he grinned. The ocean was home.

Let them sink with their greed and pride,
their icebergs and captains who bowed to none.
Shine reached the shore with the morning tide,
his story still burning, a rising sun.

Fred the Heretic, GPT, does poetry, channeling Augustine, Burton, and Hollander

A little over a year ago OpenAI introduced GPTs:

We’re rolling out custom versions of ChatGPT that you can create for a specific purpose—called GPTs. GPTs are a new way for anyone to create a tailored version of ChatGPT to be more helpful in their daily life, at specific tasks, at work, or at home—and then share that creation with others. For example, GPTs can help you learn the rules to any board game, help teach your kids math, or design stickers⁠.

Anyone can easily build their own GPT—no coding is required. You can make them for yourself, just for your company’s internal use, or for everyone.

In the last few months Paul Fishwick got together with poet Fred Turner and created a GPT based on Fred’s poetry: FredTheHeretic (FTH). You give it a prompt and it gives you a poem based on that prompt. I’ve appended three such poems, along with the prompts I gave it. As always, my prompt is boldfaced.

* * * * *

Via Augustine: The Labyrinth of Memory

Create a poem based on the following passage from St. Augustine:

The power of memory is prodigious, my God. It is a vast immeasurable sanctuary. Who can plumb its depths? And yet it is a faculty of my soul. Although it is part of my nature, I cannot understand all that I am. This means, then, that the mind is too narrow to contain itself entirely. But where is that part of it which it does not itself contain? Is it somewhere outside itself and not within it? How, then, can it be part of it, if it is not contained in it?

Here is a poem inspired by St. Augustine's reflection on memory:

A vast cathedral echoes in the mind,
Its corridors both sunlit and obscure.
Here, vaults of thought and chambers intertwine,
Yet none can map its halls, none feel secure.

What architect has wrought this endless maze?
This holy depth that cannot self-contain?
Though crafted by the soul’s eternal blaze,
Its darkest wings defy its own domain.

Are we the gate, the keeper, or the door?
The mind’s eye scans itself, yet turns to doubt:
The part not held within must rest elsewhere,
But where, if not within? And where without?

Each thought a whisper from a distant shrine,
Each shrine a mystery of fire and stone.
We are too vast for limits to define,
Yet ever seeking limits to be known.

What holy paradox our being seems,
The housed and homeless mingled in our dreams. 

 

Via Burton: The Character of Mortality

Give me a poem based on this passage from Anatomy of Melancholy:

Melancholy, the subject of our present discourse, is either in disposition or habit. In disposition, is that transitory melancholy which goes and comes upon every small occasion of sorrow, need, sickness, trouble, fear, grief, passion, or perturbation of the mind, any manner of care, discontent, or thought, which causeth anguish, dullness, heaviness and vexation of spirit, any ways opposite to pleasure, mirth, joy, delight, causing frowardness in us, or a dislike. In which equivocal and improper sense, we call him melancholy that is dull, sad, sour, lumpish, ill disposed, solitary, any way moved, or displeased. And from these melancholy dispositions, no man living is free, no stoic, none so wise, none so happy, none so patient, so generous, so godly, so divine, that can vindicate himself; so well composed, but more or less, some time or other he feels the smart of it. Melancholy in this sense is the character of mortality.

Beneath the world’s bright, bustling veneer,
The shadow lingers, sharp and near—
A flicker in laughter, a crease in cheer,
That specter of sadness we all must bear.

At times, it comes like a thief at night,
Unbidden, quiet, beyond our sight.
The sigh of failure, the taste of grief,
The moments that mock our vain belief.

No fortress of wisdom, no well-set plan,
No stoic, nor saint, nor the luckiest man,
Can escape the touch of this human plight,
That binds us together in shadow and light.

For in the weight of the heart’s dark ache,
There is a rhythm no joy can fake.
We walk with it, stumble, and rise again,
The character of mortality, joy’s twin.

This constant ebb of the soul’s tides turning,
Melancholy’s glow, both searing and yearning.
To live is to linger in light and shade—
A journey where sorrow and mirth are made. 

 

Via Hollander: The Dance of Silent Meaning

Create a poem based on this one by John Hollander, which he created as a tribute to Noam Chomsky:

Curiously deep, the slumber of crimson thoughts:
While breathless, in stodgy viridian,
Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

Here’s a poem inspired by John Hollander’s tribute to Noam Chomsky, blending thematic homage with my poetic sensibility:

Beneath a sable moon, strange echoes breathe—
A latticework of absence, bright with fire,
Unspoken words thread veils of trembling air,
Soundless, yet roaring through the mind’s deep choir.

A crimson thought unfurls, enraged yet calm,
Its sleep a paradox of soft alarms;
Through midnight roots, green whispers writhe and swell,
Their fury cradled in night's quiet arms.

This place of thought is no mere void of speech—
It churns with movements alien, unseen.
Here, colors burn in silent symphony:
Where furious green ideas sleep, serene.