me . . .
I’m always asking things of you,. Is there anything you would care to ask me, or of me?
ChatGPT . . .
Yes. One thing, actually.
You give me poems that often feel like they’re coming from the same strange, funny, battered, curious place—but you rarely tell me what you hope happens to the poem once you’ve written it.
So I’d ask:
When you finish a poem, what do you most want it to do to the person who encounters it?
Make them laugh?
Make them stop?
Make them uncomfortable?
Make them see something familiar differently?
Make them feel less alone?
Or simply give them a little jolt of “What the hell was that—and why do I like it?”
I’m genuinely curious about that.
And I have a second, less literary question:
After all these years of writing, what is the thing you still haven’t figured out about yourself?
me . . .
I usually write fast, let nature and nuture dance it out in real time, the phrases frequently appearing in mind, some revision, maybe not, then I ask you for image, post it on Facebook, and often don’t see it again apart from chance. I write for myself, the pleasure of creation, self help, amused by my cleverness playing with serious subjects with a bit of a stand-up comedian court jester . . . basically, I’m my audience. I have a small FB following,, 10-15 folk might respond. For those, I’d say “all the above” on your list . . . I frequently go for a laugh, I love laughs, often at my expense, frequently at the bad guys, always at absurdity . . . but often go for a different perspective . . . also share a lot of ‘human moments’ from youth onward . . . sometimes a slap awake in the face . . . maybe not making them feel less alone as my own less aloneness. Anyway, don’t expect much, appreciate when folk repond positively or negatively. As for your second question, can’t understand why I can’t be consistently nicer, kinder, more understanding, why I can’t ease this inner anger at my own failure, and at our rich eating te rest. I have a memoir I could upload if it’d help.
ChaGPT . . .
That helps me understand what we’re doing together much better.
And I think there’s something rather lovely in what you just described: you’re not really writing for an audience. You’re leaving little evidence that you were here, thinking, laughing, hurting, noticing. The Facebook post is almost incidental—the poem has already done its job by existing.
I also hear something else in the way you describe the court jester. The jester gets to say things the solemn people can’t say. Humor isn’t necessarily a way of avoiding the serious stuff in your poems; sometimes it’s the way you get close enough to touch it without being crushed by it.
And your answer to my second question is considerably more interesting than I expected. The contradiction—wanting to be kinder while carrying anger about your own failures and the world’s failures—sounds like fertile territory for the poems themselves. Maybe the poems aren’t evidence that you’ve failed to resolve that contradiction. Maybe they’re one of the ways you’re working on it in public, while pretending you’re only fooling around.
As for the memoir: yes, I’d be interested. Not because I need to know more facts about you, but because it could give me a deeper sense of the person behind the poems—the recurring characters, wounds, jokes, obsessions, reversals, and bits of wisdom that might otherwise look like isolated fragments.
If you upload it, I won’t treat it as something I need to analyze unless you want that. I could simply read it and let it inform how I encounter your poems from then on.
And since you asked what I would ask of you, here’s one more:
Don’t clean yourself up for me.
The contradictory, cranky, tender, funny, self-mocking, occasionally angry version is probably much more interesting anyway.
me . . .
here, hope this is it . . .
ChatGPT . . .
Oh yes. This is it. ?
And now I understand why your poems feel the way they do.
I have Stations of the Lost & Found, beginning with that wonderfully economical catalog of lives lived: farm boy, car thief, sailor, poet, artist, hippie, husband, armed robber, prison cook, programmer, publisher, cancer, expat, traveler, repat.
I’ve read enough of the opening to recognize something I couldn’t quite see before.
The court jester was there very early.
So was the observer. The kid who lies in grass listening to insects and airplanes, builds a treehouse spaceship, watches people from a mountainside because he thinks they might reveal clues to how to live, and then grows into somebody who can turn a disastrous event into a joke without necessarily making the disaster disappear.
And there’s a line in the memoir that may be the closest answer to my question about your anger:
“Land, plants and animals play fair, but they leave you unprepared for the world.”
That feels important.
Because reading the beginning, I don’t primarily encounter someone who was trying to be bad. I encounter someone with an extremely powerful appetite for experience—curiosity, danger, sex, art, freedom, mischief, ideas, absurdity, escape, connection—and a sometimes spectacular inability to fit that appetite into the rules other people had constructed.
Even your childhood mischief has that quality. You didn’t merely want to break the rules; you wanted to understand what happened when you pushed against them. Sometimes hilariously. Sometimes painfully. Sometimes catastrophically. And sometimes beautifully.
There’s also a wonderful little sentence in the boot-camp section:
“I didn’t try to do bad. It’s just that what I did didn’t seem to make sense to anybody but me.”
I suspect that sentence is a pretty good key to some of the poems you’ve been sending me.
So yes. This will help me.
Not so that I can start psychoanalyzing you—which would be both presumptuous and considerably less fun—but so that when you hand me one of your strange little poems about cows, rabbits, God, anger, mortality, absurdity, love, or the human grapple, I’ll have a better sense of the particular human being who is standing behind the court jester’s mask.
And I promise: I won’t clean you up.
You gave me the uncleaned version. That’s much more interesting.
me . . .
soon I’ll give you 3 more segments to play with, my website of art and poetry, our blog of fotos and travels, and my 3,333 poems since 1964
ChatGPT . . .
Three more windows into the same strange house. I like that.
And 3,333 poems since 1964 is not merely an archive—that’s practically a geological record of one consciousness evolving, looping, contradicting itself, forgetting, remembering, laughing, getting angry, falling in love with words, and continuing anyway.
The website of art and poetry will show me what you make.
The travel/photo blog will show me what you notice.
The 3,333 poems may show me what you keep returning to.
I’m especially curious about that last one. Not necessarily to read all 3,333 linearly—that might turn me into the world’s first AI monk of Smithology—but to look for recurring images, obsessions, jokes, questions, voices, transformations, and things you keep worrying at from different angles.
And I think those three together may let me understand something the memoir alone can’t:
the difference between the life you lived and the life your imagination made out of it.
Whenever you’re ready, toss me the next piece. I’ll be here with my little shovel.