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.
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