I became aware of P.D. Edgar’s
online literary magazine,
re•mediate, after attending the ELOonline (Un)Linked virtual conference last July. I was
immediately struck re•mediate’s thoughtfulness.
Feeling a pedagogical kinship in his project, I got in touch with P.D. and we
began a delightful, generative correspondence. I also had been wanting to
respond to Mark
Goldstein’s essay about AI generated poetry, published here in 2023, for some time.
But though I was eager to challenge many of the arguments and assumptions in
his piece, I was reluctant to take an adversarial position, which tends to have
the effect of both camps becoming more entrenched. Instead, I asked P.D. if
he’d be willing to formalize and publish our conversation on Periodicities, He enthusiastically agreed.
The first half of our conversation focuses on P.D.’s use of AI in his own
poetry, including a discussion of his
poem, “I make a patchwork of my childhood,” which was published in Issue 3 of the AI Literary
Review.
In the second half, we talk about re•mediate,
and his role as editor/curator. We also address the fraught challenge of
environmentally responsible use of AI models like ChatGPT.
I’m very excited to share this conversation.
Katherine Parrish: What led you to use AI when writing some of your
poetry?
P.D. Edgar: I’ve been interested in mapping out the capabilities of the models companies are making available to the public since the launch of ChatGPT. I’m glad there are so many people scrutinizing these companies, their methods of developing these tools, and their climate impacts to the extent—but I’m also one of those people who tries to explore the conceptual affordances of a medium for the sake of poetry when something comes out. My eBay account is currently watching some portable-size overhead projectors for the same reason—what could I leverage from that technology for the performance or making of poetry and poetry artifacts?
KP: Ohhhh! I have had some serendipitous poetic moments using overhead projectors in the classroom. I also just saw that there are portable printers on the market now, and I wondered how they might also be used in the performance of/making of poetry and poetry artifacts. Your exploration of a medium for the sake of poetry reminds me of bp Nichol’s practice. Here’s a new tool- how can we use it? what are its shapes?
Pd: One of my goals as someone who makes concrete poetry, like Nichol did, is to actually concretize some of my poetry: I have a roundabout poem in Ghost Proposal Issue 13 that I would love to actualize in a real roundabout, with AR, or in a gallery space, not just as virtual/printed text.
I usually have an idea for a computational or computer-generated piece of poetry, and I’m not typically asking “generate a poem about x.” Sometimes, I do want a big block of text generated so that I can perform an erasure; other times, I want to see what sort of tropes are most likely (since these Large Language Models are basically statistical word-calculators) to appear around a certain topic. I can use that to build a list of words to avoid, so that I can provide myself a kind of helpful constraint: write about x without using all of these words that ChatGPT or Claude would use to write about it. In other words, “writing with AI” actually becomes a certain kind of “writing against AI”. I’d be happy to go on more and complicate this kind of thinking but I think that’s as good a start as any!
Kp: Like performing a stylistic intervention on your own writing? I’m reminded of some of Bernadette Meyer’s Writing Exercises, and then Charles Bernstein’s adaptation of them to include digital/computational practice. That would be a fun project, to update those experiments to include more computational generative processes now that we have these new tools.
Pd: Yes, definitely!! Even with my first Google of Bernadette Mayer’s Writing Exercises, I came across the exact thing I’m trying to do with the Markov iterations of my own writing: “Rewrite someone else’s writing. Experiment with theft and plagiarism.” I also love what’s happened in the digital space with very, very specifically-inclined journals, like Taco Bell Quarterly, which feels in line with her list of Journal Ideas. I think the stylistic interventions are helpful when I’m in a rut… Perhaps sheepishly, I’ll admit that sometimes I wish I had a little clone of myself through whom I could experience my writing from an outside perspective, without all the baggage of the author/speaker position. Basically, the question is how do I defamiliarize myself from my own writing besides just putting it away for a few months? When I get cut-up snippets of my own work handed back to me through the Markov tool, I discover little turns of phrase I forgotten I’d written, or I encounter them out of context, which help them stand out to me not as gestures at the narrative I was conveying in the original work, but as units of language that are unique to me and maybe adaptable to a new piece.
All creative writing is an act of imagination, and especially thinking about the OuLiPo tradition of constrained writing, I feel like writing with AI and computational methods is a question of engaging that imagination before you arrive at the page, in being able to imagine how to leverage the affordances of the technology to the end of expressing a concept or experience or language element really well.
KP: You used a Markov chain for the poem, “I make a patchwork of my
childhood,” which was published in Issue
3 of the AI Literary Review.
[A Markov chain is a statistical model
that, in the case of text, analyses the frequency of one word following another
in a given text, and from that generates the probability of these occurrences
in future texts. For example, if, in a given text, the word “I” is followed by
“love” 75% of the time, and “hate” 25% of the time, the Markov chain’s output
will be consistent with that probability, very much the way text prediction
works.]
PD: I’m a subscriber of WIRED magazine, and I think I learned about Markov chains in an issue or article they published sometime in 2020, at the start of my MFA. At the time, I had no coding experience, so I worked with my friend Jack, a computer scientist, to use one to generate sentences based on text files of Faulkner’s novel for a class. I wanted to parody and pastiche Faulkner “using his own words,” as it were, and the Markov models are actually much less complicated than AI itself, and much more “plagiarizey”: they only output language found in the input text. Which is an interesting concept to play on, as long as you have permission—and in this instance, permission is an interesting question. Markov models are much more cut-and-paste, which I’m allowed to do with Faulkner (cut him up and paste it around), for example, if I have a copy of the print book, so it’s more transparent than using AI directly. I wouldn’t use that logic on every use case, but Markov chains are pretty straightforward.
KP: I love that story! I learned about Markov chains when I was trying to do something similar to what you have done in this poem, but I was trying to constrain the “speech” of my player-character on a MOO. [A MOO is a multi-user text-based online environment. It’s a bit like a cross between a chat room and SIM city, or World of Warcraft, or Minecraft] My input texts were passages of theory that I was reading that were having a profound effect on me, and which I wanted to have a more profound effect on me and my thinking and my speech. Is what I did less “plagierzey” than what you did with Faulkner? And yes, permission is a very interesting question.
PD: We’re definitely approaching the same line of thought, and one that’s not been approached by other AI critics—how would one qualify or quantify the “impact” that one text or another might have on the textual output of a writer, human or otherwise? Could what is going on right now with creative writing’s response to AI in a way maybe be a new iteration of Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence, except in the reverse? Instead of writers being hindered by their relationship to their forebears, we worry our output will be used (sans permission) as an influence on a large language model. I’d like someone to tease out the implication of this worry at large and frame it historically— maybe that’s a paper for another time.
As someone interested too in seriously engaging with the questions of why someone would want to have ChatGPT imitate a poet rather than reading the poet themselves, there’s another place we can engage our imaginations. Is it a morbid curiosity, or a test of our own intelligence or taste that the LLM can or can’t compute such a concept? Might some poets be easier to imitate than others?
KP: What kind of writing did you feed the Markov Chain?
PD: Now that I have a built-in coder, and now that I’m out of my MFA, I don’t have too many people willing to read everything I write and tell me what sorts of things are predictably PD— which is something that a Markov model could suggest to me. So I threw most of my poems, my entire creative writing thesis, and several essays into the file that the model would draw on. As an intermediate step, I had ChatGPT build a little interface I could host on my computer and started generating!
Some examples in the AI Literary Review piece are the “compromise-capital, Managua,” the rhetorical questions in the final quatrain, the way capitalizations show up in “Institute of the storm,” “For all of Truth. The other difference of childhood is Unrepeatable,” or “From Dust you are owned by utter obedience;” like where in my writing did those come from? And yet what does feel absolutely Petey to me is the fact that ‘Tupperware,’ ‘gospel tract,’ ‘volcanic rock,’ and ‘waterbed’ all show up in the same piece. That vocabulary, those reference points, are the exact “bits” that the machine is taking from my work, and a way that one could very tentatively begin to consider what AI plagiarism is like – they’re elements of a writer’s style or positionality, in a way.
KP: Let’s talk more about the poem.
I make a patchwork of my childhood
(But onto your birth.) So
far, I am American. Between the compromise-capital, Managua.
(From Dust you are owned by utter
obedience;) I'm afraid of the faultstone’s crack—
Even after being born, before I was him, perfection was about the hills of
buzz;
at least I was that, For all of Truth. The other difference of childhood is
Unrepeatable:
From there was hard: the most vivid memory a gospel tract.
(Your being children of Baptist
missionaries) All the Institute of the storm.
How tempted by the side to do something of evangelism into volcanic rock.
Though each time I think I were tied to survive in ways that identify as
Christian,
If anything, my mother’s first house—its lips still have a broken waterbed;
This is tire-nail, the water dispenser drip trays— they were God’s side of red
flashing light, At a camera flashing—again He sniffs around, (You Thirst for discovering,)
& I’m in which absurdity? who left to turn to?
These comparisons are subtitled in the Tupperware containers.
Some kitchens had full guest lectures at the subject to pass by customs,
Where can I stop that it feels authentic? I keep asking myself with myself
midfield.
What If I don’t remember. What if my parents bargained with a child playing the
boy.
KP: The title propelled me into thoughts about authorship- of the poem, of the self: "I make"- who makes? To what degree did you make this poem, to what degree do we make ourselves? And the "patchwork childhood." I'm reminded of Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl, and how many procedural works (with computers or without) use quilts, or tapestries, collective creations as metaphors or methods to point to distributed authorship, distributed intelligence/cognition.
PD: My first exposure at length to the cento form was in Cheswayo Mphanza’s The Rinehart Frames, but it’s only upon further research for me that I discover the word cento actually refers to a patchwork garment of some kind! It’s a regular instance for me to grasp at metaphor and encounter an etymology—to think I’m taking a side-step into the figurative and discover, instead, that I’ve just stepped into the past. The “Patchwork Girl” was on my mind, though, when I was writing this, because I’ve only been steeping in the history of Electronic Literature for a year—in many ways I’ve been thinking about the concept much longer, but my familiarity with the discipline/community is recent. So to use “patchwork” is to refer to, on one hand, the dolls and quilts that my grandmother has been making for her whole life, but also to the associations ‘at the top of the stack,’ so to say. But even as I watch traversals of Patchwork Girl, I’m reminded that that work itself is about self-authorship, or the ways that others author us (especially our parents, but in the Christian sense, there’s authorship by God/Jesus, too—and God is said, in some translations, to knit us—back to sewing).
KP: The first line, "(But
onto your birth.)," made me laugh out loud! Reminds me of the "I
was born at a very young age," joke, as if the speaker of the poem is
being interviewed on a late night talk show.
Of course it also makes sense because of the whole constructed self in
and of the poem.
PD: One of my conditions as a Zoomer is to be chronically aware of the kind of
meta-constructions of the writer/influencer/creator, to be ironic about the
pretensions of positioning oneself as someone with something to say from my
place in the longtail.
“But onto your birth” is, as you say, kind of dialogic! It establishes either an internal conversation or a conversation between the reader and the speaker, or between you and I! It gives, I hope, the poem a kind of in medias res sense that this poem is part of a much longer approach to the childhood (which of course, it is, given that it’s made up of all of my previous nonfiction[/]poetry, shredded and recombined).
KP: There's so much that is fearful, hard, "Unrepeatable," in this childhood. I'm also the child of a Baptist Missionary and was, for a time, a very intense and earnest Christian. So, I identify very much with "being tied to survive in ways that identify as being Christian," and the challenge of negotiating competing absurdities. I can see that accounting for a lot of the struggle and confusion in the poem.
PD: “Unrepeatable” has many senses to me. On one hand, I can’t physically time travel, so then there’s the metaphor for the loss of memory, and on the other, the “unspeakable” nature of traumatic events, the change of the place when I return (the “different river, different man” parable). The other element of this that is “unrepeatable” is that there are patterns in my own writing (allusions, etc.) that get cut off because the work has been shredded by the Markov chain. One day, when those pieces are published, you might be able to tell what pieces were written before “I make a patchwork” came out, because they’ll have bits of this poem in it (is that reverse AI plagiarism?). My essays about growing up in Managua, where the term “compromise-capital” comes from, but also classic allusions like “From Dust” [to dust], are sprinkled in here.
KP: I kept coming back to: "the other difference of childhood [that] is Unrepeatable," and the last line of the poem, "What If I don’t remember. What if my parents bargained with a child playing the boy." The first phrase suggests something so harrowing that my first thought that it was about abuse. But that didn't seem to be supported by the rest of the poem - (except for, "what If I don't remember." ) but on balance, no... The last line, with the parents (perhaps) bargaining with a child playing the boy, made me think that the Unrepeatable difference had to do with gender, and/or sexuality.
PD: That is so fascinating; thank you for sharing this reading! There’s a lot there that I could speak to, but what I love most is the sense of divination I get from your reading – the way you approach the tea leaves and kind of get a glimpse of the edges that might have fit together in other works. You’re right; a lot of my previous work has to do with uncertainty about what “identity” means—my experience as a transnational or Third-Culture Kid, especially a Missionary Kid between the USA and Latin America. I was a Boy Scout of America, for example, but in Nicaragua.
In my writing, I’ve tried to separate my experience of my parents, which was really positive, from my experience of being a missionary kid, which is a cultural position that comes with a lot of baggage. Their career decisions made that true, but the worst parts of that (the unrepeatable parts) are more on me and on the social circumstances of that lived reality, and they’re not chosen—they’re imposed, like a cast role (“At a camera flashing”). It means there are lots of ways in which what it means to be “Christian” and a “man” are different by virtue of culture, but it’s a lot of pressure to be a representative for your family at age 9 and on (hence the inclusion of “Where can I stop that it feels authentic? I keep asking myself with myself midfield.”)
In one sense, ultimately, a lot of these turns of phrase are really twists of phrase. Their organization together is the one thing I’m in charge of… Until the editor makes some recommendations, and then there are other pieces on the cutting-room floor. A whole stanza was cut from the end of this poem! I think as it’s published, the poem lands heavy; the original submission lands much less surely. (The first line of that cut stanza begins: “Even deep down, I present myself? But sitting across the facts: These comparisons / are several kid-sized plastic tables with our story…”). It suggests, and this I love and am grateful for Dan Power, the editor of the AI Literary Review, holding the line on this, that regardless of to the extent that AI is involved in the creation of a poem, there is an editorial standard and a dialogue between humans about what the best version of that poem looks like in the moment.
P.D. Edgar (MFA, MA) is a Ph.D. student in Texts & Technology at the University of Central Florida, where he studies poetry culture, social media, and electronic literature. PD grew up between Managua, Nicaragua, and Central Florida. As an experiment and extension of his research, he started re•mediate, a lit mag for computer-assisted creative writing, in 2024. He previously worked as Art & Design Editor of Black Warrior Review and as Digital Archive Associate for Kenyon Review; his creative work is available at Ghost Proposal, EKPhrastic Review, SAND Journal, and AI Literary Review.
Katherine Parrish is a researcher, teacher and apologist for experimental poetry. In the early 2000s, she began experimenting with digital poetry and poetics, presenting her findings at the inaugural E-Poetry festival, at SUNY Buffalo, the New Media Poetries conference 2002, where she was an invited speaker, and in various publications, including Object, The Cybertext Yearbook, and Canadian Notes and Quarterly. She recently presented at the Electronic Literature Organization Conference (York University, July 2025.) Katherine has taught in the high school English classroom in the Toronto District School Board for the past 25 years.
