Katherine Parrish : Conversations with P.D. Edgar, part two

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 by 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.

 

 

Katherine Parrish: Tell me about your web magazine, re•mediate. Why did you start it?

P.D. Edgar: In the past several years, many waves of new(ish) writing practices have come and stayed online. There were some social-media based forms like Twitterature and Instapoetry, and all of the webnovels and fanfictions and digital folklore on text-based sites, and then when I was in graduate school we got whiffs of Web3: first, the blockchain and NFT art,and then the public-facing chat-based large language model ChatGPT, which was specifically being marketed as a writing tool. I became immediately interested in what sort of things could or couldn't be done with it at the time, and I presented at the Digitorium conference, hosted by the Alabama Digital Humanities Center, on how some poetry forms came almost naturally to ChatGPT even in the early days (some didn't).

But each time those things came out, I watched some folks condemn that exploration, and some folks build community around it. NFT poetry got the VerseVerse, there was a short-lived attempt to do poetry in the Metaverse [the Facebook parent company’s virtual-reality space], and fanfic and Instapoetry are still going strong. I wondered what it might be like to bring a literary sensibility to the AI tools, and with my background with Black Warrior Review  (art and design), Kenyon Review  (digital archive associate), and my college newspaper (I was news, opinions, copy, and editor-in-chief at different stages), I wanted to be an early (but critical!) adopter and editor of computer-assisted work writ large—I wanted to put "AI" in conversation with all of the other ways our experiences of life and of writing are mediated by our computers.

Up until that point, no one I knew was doing that, but little did I know AI Literary Review and Ensemble Park were shaping up at the exact same time, which proves to me that there was an obvious need to ask, "With these tools, what is responsibly possible?" I was just starting my PhD program, and doing a summer fellowship planning the online ELO 2024, and it seemed like I'd have the advising/institutional support to do this in the Texts & Technology program at the University of Central Florida, compared to my previous (great, but more traditional) institutions. 

KP: How do you feel it’s going? And what are your hopes for its future?

PD: Honestly, I feel kind of honored and shocked every submission period with the variety and volume of work we get in the queue. It's not 6,000 poems a period, like it can be at an historic magazine, which is a good thing. I don't know what I would do if it were! But luckily re•mediate's mission and vision are specific enough that it's really easy to turn down good work that could definitely find a home at another magazine.

Being plugged in with the Electronic Literature Organization from the beginning has been a huge part of there being a community interested in the work, and interested in being a part of the magazine—Monica Storss and I met over a Second Tuesday Salon Zoom, and I was delighted to bring her on to edit re•mediate issue 3 [Next Realities].  I had done a little of my own virtual-reality poetry at one point, but I didn't have the breadth of vision Monica has for extended-reality storytelling, and it's been wonderful to share the reins with her, and a really lovely collaboration. It makes me excited for the future of the magazine, because as long as folks submit work that applies to re•mediate's intentions as a publication, I'll be happy to put together seven or eight pieces every four months for our readers, and for future researchers who might wonder what the heck was going on with literature and AI in 2025.

As a digital humanist, I have to hold this project as open-handedly as possible. I was telling another collaborator over the phone today that if this were to go away tomorrow, I would be happy to sunset the project (as long as it's archived well). I've been taking a directed reading course on literary-periodical/little-magazine history this summer, and it's been really refreshing to know that the poverty of the magazine, its ephemerality, the kind of stubborn willingness of little-mag editors to take risks, are all baked into the definition of the term—that in some ways it's the journals and magazines we think of as literary institutions that are the anomalies. 

KP: Tell me about the process notes you require for each submission.

PD:  That’s something that AI Literary Review, as well as re•mediate and another magazine, Ensemble Park, all require. I think it comes out of Taper’s requirement of making the code open-source: the process of becoming a poet and developing your taste is kind of each person’s to undergo, but the process of coding or leveraging computational tools is a barrier-to-entry that we like to leave unlocked for anyone to play with.

I require process notes partially for that archival process (knowing how these pieces came into being) and partially because of that mission to inform/educate folks on the methods and ethics of working with "AI"—and to demystify that nebulous, loaded term. Most of my contributors are homebrewing a large language model, doing found-language work, or writing around the topic of life online, not just "prompting chatGPT to write them a x about y." However, the most interesting instances of that so far was the screenplay by Daniel Sherman in issue 3, which incorporates it almost as a character, and Dan Power's satire made by prompting a legal chatbot to summarize purchasing the moon.

Neither of those are copy-pastes of AI, and I haven't got much of that in the queue, either. If I did, I'd look at the process note to get a sense for the vision of the submitter. Because, in the interest of critique, sometimes it is interesting to let AI speak for itself. From Black Warrior Review, I inherited a sensibility that says in most cases, the writer's work is complete when they submit, so I don't overhaul stories or poems before they go out unless there's a word-count issue on a piece I really value (we take prose under 4,000 words). Ensemble Park goes into a lot more detail and has a more rigorous process-note editing process, which I really value as well.

I talked to Dan Power of AI Literary Review about this in preparation for a panel we were on together at ELO 25 in Toronto. A discerning submitter will probably notice the slight differences between the submission guidelines of his magazine, mine, and Ensemble Park, not just the language choices (whether we call these works of “human–computer interaction,” “AI-generated,” or “computer-assisted”) but also about the degrees of authorship in a piece. The other existing schools of thought around authorship, like the automatic writers, Oulipo, found poets, combinatorial writers, centos, renga, and so on, raise this question. I wonder if there’s a matrix or multiple Venn diagrams to be made?

These questions are often at the heart of the little two-axis plots I include in re•mediate in each Editor’s Note. I don’t think there’s going to be a single field on which these questions can be plotted, per se, because the conversations we’re having on AI are multi-dimensional: the above graphs are neutral on the environment, politics, and kind of definitionally loose. Where does “found” poetry land here, for example?

KP:  I love those two-axis plots. It feels like a more useful way to talk about the relationship between the human author and computer/digital tools than a taxonomy. The feminist in me is wary of taxonomies, and the need to name and label. Of course, we need a language to describe these operations in order to have meaningful conversations. I find it instructive. I’ve learned a lot about what goes into publishing a physical text by studying the various stages and participants in the creation and publication of a text that involved computer generation. But I whole-heartedly agree with you that the matrix doesn’t take into account environment, politics, gender, sexuality, class, etc.

PD: I'm so glad for what you said about taxonomies—I think we're right to be wary of them, and I hope that the graphs that I include with each Editor's Note aren't taken by readers to be definitive. For me, they're gestures at the varying dimensions available to us in literary criticism, like the Franklin spectacles in National Treasure. Every time I put out a call for submissions at re•mediate, I make a point of saying that we invite criticism about computer-assisted creative writing.  As of yet few have taken up the charge. I hope that, whether it arrives in my inbox or not, someone will take re•mediate to task for the work that I've published so far, will engage with it creatively or critically. One of my favorite things about collaborating with folks, whether it's with Monica Storss for the guest-edited issue, with you on this interview, with contributors, or with the editors of AI Literary Review and Ensemble Park on the upcoming ELO panel, is seeing this project through others' eyes! 

KP: At ELO, we mused about a way to estimate the emissions of a piece of AI art/writing, based on the process note, and find a way to offset this.

PD: It was a fun thought experiment between me and you and Kyle Booten, of Ensemble Park, the idea of a kind of carbon credit being the submission fee for an issue of re•mediate, or maybe instead of a dollar amount, someone could offset their use by not driving for a week, or bumping their air conditioning down a few degrees, or fasting from meat for a month. For me, that line of thinking is really interesting, and I think the world would benefit from an open-source "emission estimator" for the use of AI similar to the Microcovid Project. But I also go a step further, to the provocation of how much data about your life you include in that calculation. I live in Florida, in a Duke Energy zone, and while there's a lot of solar here, there's also a huge energy cost to the deforestation of the state, the air conditioning, the amount I have to drive to do anything in Orlando, and the provenance of my food.

If we were to make emissions offsets or climate credits of some kind the submission fee, for some of our submitters, that would make submissions free, right? It seems that way on its face, unless you were to count the meals you ate the day before you wrote the piece (which powered the work by extension), or the amount of time you spent on the computer putting together the submission, and so on. Maybe the initial version of the AI Art Emissions Estimator is just tuned to the production process itself, but as an essay like Wendell Berry's "Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer" suggests, personal computers or laptops were in the hotseat environmentally that AI is now 30 years ago—in which case the paper/emissions required to switch to mail submissions and print publishing would be implicated too. I grew up without air conditioning, drinking from the tap, so it's not so hard to keep my apartment comparatively warm and not buy bottled water. But I drink coffee, an imported good, every day. That certainly powers re•mediate, especially in April, July, and November.

Maybe it's because I've been reading e. e. cummings, Carl Sandburg, the book of Jeremiah, and Kierkegaard this summer, but at this moment I think that the humanists who are best equipped to deal with the world we're in and the one to come are the ones who can look clearly at all of the ways our fault-findings self-implicate on labor, ecology, and humanity. As a Floridian, my concern about AI's impact on the environment must reflect back on my state's insistence on air conditioning while we disincentivize home solar installation and sell a third of state land to developers. My desire for environmental justice can't just be "my entire technological life as is, but I abstain from AI"—I have to interrogate how vertically integrated the excess is.

To be honest, I don't use AI much in my day-to-day, and I ideate as much as I can on paper because I want to prompt in as targeted a way as possible and build a coding literacy for myself. I can only bring that magnifying glass to bear on my own existence, though, because I fundamentally believe that my humanity is not grounded in whether a computer can do what I do or not, or in whether this magazine lives long, or whether I have 100 percent certainty that I'm living the absolute most ethically I can in this exact moment. To spend more time in critical remove from my own body, my own life, and my own art, rather than in them, is maybe a more inhuman thing. I want to know by engagement, by reading, by listening, by living, by making—in some ways, "living the questions" has disillusioned me from certain uses of AI quicker than if I fretted over feathers on ethical scales.

 

 

 

 

 

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.

Katherine Parrish : Conversations with P.D. Edgar, part one

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 by 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.