Here’s a sample of what’s coming in the audiobook for “Strange Throats”:
Thrhythymn everybody gets down in CicadaTown beginning every summer every electric smartasscar hums a filtered, sawtooth hymn in a language only the electrics know subwoofers from monster jam trucks wubble in that cleaning-out-your-ears-with a-suave-swab frequency noise? nah, this is signal singing praises to dog day cicadas no one knows the real lyrics, but this is what CicadaTown chants: call or follow hem and haw or follow all y’all will fall into the thrall of the thrum-rhythm-hymn the thrhythm-hymn the thrhythymn an old woman at a gas station nods to the sound of the pumps hips shifting kids at the crosswalk shimmy and hum in binaural beats mimicking the hiss and stomp of bus brakes they call it cicada step it’s just easier to move in the groove when the cicadas beat the time: call or follow jack your jaw or follow all y’all will fall into the thrall of the thrum-rhythm-hymn the thrhythm-hymn the thrhythymn everybody gets down in CicadaTown even the EVs hop on their hydraulics smartass SUVs toss townies like a funky salad they land on their feet and join the growing circles within circles singing to the periodicals on the eve of their coming cycle: whether you call or follow whether you hem and haw or follow whether you call or follow whether in joy or sorrow all y’all will fall into the thrall of the thrum-rhythm-hymn the thrhythm-hymn the thrhythymn
What do
dance viruses,
the existential undead,
and choirs in the clouds of gas giants
have in common?
They are among the STRANGE THROATS in my new collection of speculative poetry.
What if transit routes had personalities?
What if parts of a city could riff on a shared story?
For the past couple of years I’ve been tilting at a strange windmill:
I’ve been building a system that generates poetry based on MARTA bus routes in Atlanta.
Each route has its own personality (a bit like a D&D character sheet) There’s a central narrative based off of some of my own poems that can influence how that route “speaks”. The system generates poems in each route’s voice based off of local context like weather, traffic, and location.
I’ve finally put together an audio stream where some of the poems are read aloud with generated soundscapes:
Now that I’ve learned to turn weather data feeds into poetry, I want to take it to another level. For my next AI poetry project, I want to use MARTA public transit data to create poems with audio and visuals, but I want to use different prompts and/or workflows.
At the moment I’m thinking of riffing off an idea from The Ghettobirds collection: imagining MARTA as a sentient being, with the data functioning as surrogates for senses. I’m also thinking I’d like to put myself – or others – directly into the creative loop. Thinking biometrics or likes.
After my initial weather-driven AI poetry experiments, I wanted to go to the next level to create more engaging videos. This time I used multiple AI tools to create the poetry, speech, music, and visuals. Every element, from words to images to sound, reflects the creative capabilities of AI in capturing the essence of weather and nature. The result is a ten-minute compilation showcasing poems generated by ChatGPT interpreting weather data with no text edits.
Visuals
To create the visuals, I created a JSON file containing the information saved from generating several weather poems. Then I wrote a Python script that looped through the file, asking ChatGPT to generate an image based on the poem text and its corresponding weather data.
I then took each image and the audio from each poem to create animations using Kaiber.ai.
Voices
To add some texture to the vocals, I modified my original weather poem process to exclude background music, leaving only video and speech. I also added a random choice between four voice models from ElevenLabs. I then used another Python script to add time-stretched tracks to the vocals, giving it a more otherworldly feel.
To be honest, my wife was not impressed with this decision: she had trouble making out the speech and recommended I at least create subtitles (which I did, but you may have to turn them on manually).
Music
All the background music was composed by AIVA.ai. I picked from one of a thousand tracks or sections of track I’ve generated over the course of a year, then put them together manually in Audacity.
Final Composition
Once I had my audio and visual elements, I put them together using the OpenShot video editor (in case you haven’t noticed, I like to use open source software whenever I can).
Conclusion
Overall, this was another really fun learning experience. I like what came out, flaws and all. And there are definitely flaws.
The poems are interesting, but are clearly hallucinating at times. Granted, I gave ChatGPT permission to do so, so I shouldn’t be surprised.
I do wish I had more control over the animations, or better yet automate the process, but I don’t know how to do that. Yet. Same goes for the additional processing for the vocals and music.
More importantly I want my next project to have more of my poetic voice. This particular project has its merits and its own beauty – but it showcases more of my skills as a programmer than as a poet.
Actually…I’m going to take that back. I’m going to go out on a limb and posit that this is one of my voices, one that is an amalgamation of the programmer, the poet, the LLM, the external data, and the AI services.
I feel strongly that I must be in the loop when it comes to art that I claim is mine. Where I am in that loop, however, will depend on the art I am creating and why I’m creating it.
That won’t sit well with many creators or consumers of art.
To those folks I say this: So be it – I’ll see you in the marketplace of ideas.
I have a lot of ideas rolling around in my head regarding chapbooks; some involving speculative poetry and some not.
I’ve recently completed a project whereby I used ChatGPT to generate poems based on weather data for random American cities, so it would make perfect sense to have the next chapbook use that project as a starting point.
It really wouldn’t be hard to pick either a specific state and compose a predetermined number of poems based on a single day’s weather within that state.
Or I could focus on a single city and create a chapbook based on a 14-day weather forecast. This approach would allow for a deeper exploration of a city’s weather patterns over time.
Either these projects would basically be looking at these places as if they were under an x-ray light, missing large amounts of detail we normally take for granted, but capturing glimpses of patterns that would not be seen any other way—at least that’s the hope.
Either option would start with a raw set of poems to work with within a week or two. What will take longer, though, will be putting together an editing process that gives me more control over the finished pieces. I want the chapbook(s) to serve as proofs-of-concept, demonstrating the combination of artificial intelligence and human creativity to enhance and inspire the artistic process.
The heart in the iron… (composed by me with AI using an Allpoetry account devoted to such experiments)
Moreover, I envision incorporating multiple media into the chapbook to complement the poems:
Photographs and videos (real and surreal)
soundscapes
spoken text. etc.
I would also explore the possibility of adding interactive elements, such as QR codes that link to multimedia to the poems, giving them literally more dimensions.
Who knows – maybe this will captivate someone’s imagination by inviting readers to engage with weather and poetry and technology in a new and profound way.
Alrighty then…enough dreaming. Time to get to doing.
This is a somewhat real-time deep dive into one of the ways I use generative AI (in this case ChatGPT4) to develop a poem, along with my views on doing so.
Apologies in advance for the clickbait-y title.
After searching YouTube for videos on the topic, I wound up being more than a little disappointed. All I found were either rants about “AI will ruin poetry” or demos of “look at how cool this is with only a prompt or two”.
I can do better than that, even with an admittedly less than perfect presentation.????
Be warned, this is a long one, folks, so buckle up.
So…very late, but I got something out there. I made heavy use of Microsoft Azure components like Logic Apps, Azure Functions, and Storage Accounts. And I got to use a lot of Python.
In the end, I put together something that generates – or attempts to generate – a poem three times a day, based on the weather from a random US city and state. The github repo only contains the python code along with a couple of unfinished sections.
There’s more that I would like to do, like automatically upload to YouTube, but for now I’m going to call this “good enough”.
My wife did offer some possible uses of the code as it stands: I could create generate poems for all the cities in one state and make that an audiobook. Or take one city and create a month’s worth of poems. Might just try that, as that takes little effort.
What do