Chat GPT Poetry Friday

So of COURSE Walt Hunter, writing for The Atlantic, thinks that Chat GPT is Not a Poet. He's an associate professor and chair of English at Case Western Reserve. He has to take poetry seriously. 

I took poetry seriously when I was twenty. I had a poem published in Writer's Digest. They paid me $50 for it, which was bank back then. But I soon realized that there were reasons people monetized their college degrees, and many of these reasons had to do with eating three meals a day and living in places with controllable amounts of roaches. So I stopped writing poetry and threw myself into my very lucrative college major, which was Latin. With a super useful and sought after minor, Ancient Greek. I got a job teaching Latin at a private school in Cincinnati where I made slightly less than I had earned at Lazarus.

Then I was unemployed a lot, went back to graduate school, and ended up in a school library.

My plan for retirement, which is years away, is to go on aimless walks, make baby quilts, watch BBC, and write bad poetry. I might take entire days to write one bad poem. I like formal verse. It takes time. 

Unless you are Chat GPT. Its grasp of meter is pretty bad (can you not count to ten, Chat GPT?), but it's rhyming is pretty good, and there's something endearing about just how bad it is. I want to get up at a poetry slam and give a dramatic reading of this one, especially. Such a pity it totally flubbed that last line. 

When I retire, I can spend a whole day thinking of a new one as I walk in the rain smelling the spring flowers. And yes, I am now only allowed to spend 15 minutes a day on Chat GPT, after a friend caught me giving it a prompt to write a poem in the style of Edna St. Vincent Millay's Brief Candle about foot pain.

The Taste of Controversy: An Ode to Spam

Out in the store there lies a can of Spam, A mystery in metal, pink and bold, Its origins unknown, a strange comestible jam, But some do find it appetizing, truth be told.

Some may turn their noses up at Spam, And others praise it as a savory delight, A matter of taste, and not a simple scam, To each their own, in this culinary fight.

Oh Spam, you are a food both loved and loathed, A symbol of excess, and yet of thrift, A product that has managed to stay afloat, Despite the jokes, the insults, and the myth.

So here's to Spam, that oft-maligned meat, May it continue to find a place to eat.

(It also regenerated a slightly better one: 

May it remain a staple, a culinary treat.