I used to think that the main role of poetry was to preserve a space for insight and honest language in a society thoroughly steeped in propaganda, much of it as invisible to us as water presumably is to the fish who swim in it. Now I think it’s even more basic than that. With public discourse increasingly taken over by algorithms and large languge models, and public opinion shaped by a corporate death cult convinced that consciousness can somehow be digitized and made immortal, the language arts are becoming a refuge for embodied humanism. Those with no capacity for empathy can still sometimes write great poems, but for poetry to thrive it needs authentic communication between humans, and it has to continually aspire toward the imaginative worlds of others, human and nonhuman alike.
It’s possible that the proliferation of LLM-generated content will actually create more demand for creative writing by humans, but if so, I think it will take time to reach established page-poets who benefit (to the extent that anyone really benefits) from the current system. In the short term, we might see some new admixture of avant-garde and performance poetry emerge on some unexpected platform—think TikTok or Twitch.
Hell, this is could be happening already, for all I know. I do find, from what I read of contemporary poetry in translation—more than half of my reading these days—that the poets of the world are rising to the occasion of our multiple planetary emergencies. The American university system, upon which so many US poets depend, may be in deep trouble, but China has risen, and its millennia-old poetry culture has been thoroughly revitalized by the infusion of Western forms and ideas—pretty much the same thing that happened with previous poetry booms in the Tang and Song. Dickinson alone has been translated into Mandarin by at least 16 different, well-established translators, just since the 1980s. It puts me in mind of the Daodejing, the second most-translated-into-English book after the Bible.
As a comparative literature major, it delights me no end to think that Emily Dickinson could become the Laozi of China. But returning to the topic of this brief mind-fart, time will tell how the Chinese manage the sorcerer’s apprentice that is AI. Contrary to the initial flurry of propaganda, it turns out that DeepSeek produces longer answers that require more energy, so the CCP is playing Russian Roulette with the biosphere as much as anyone else at this point. It will be interesting to see what Chinese poets make of all this, in a society where dissent is suppressed but poetry is produced and consumed obsessively. And no, I don’t think those two facts are unrelated.
