{"id":10370,"date":"2022-05-10T01:05:00","date_gmt":"2022-05-10T07:05:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=10370"},"modified":"2022-05-07T21:04:21","modified_gmt":"2022-05-08T03:04:21","slug":"robots-are-writing-poetry-and-many-people-cant-tell-the-difference","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=10370","title":{"rendered":"Robots Are Writing Poetry, and Many People Can\u2019t Tell the Difference"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/thewalrus.ca\/ai-poetry\/\">Carmine Starnino<\/a>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>When a book&nbsp;of brazenly surrealistic poetry and prose was published in 1984, attributed to a mysterious figure named \u201cRacter,\u201d it was hard to know what to make of it.&nbsp;<em>The Policeman\u2019s Beard Is Half-Constructed<\/em>was a fever vision of weirdness. \u201cI need electricity,\u201d declared the poet in a signature moment. \u201cI need it more than I need lamb or pork or lettuce or cucumber.?\/?I need it for my dreams.\u201d That same tone, at once charming and confounding, charged Racter\u2019s aphorisms, limericks, fictional riffs, bits of dialogue, and odd attempts at nursery rhyme (\u201cThere once was a ghoulish sad snail\u201d).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Reviews were mixed. Most conceded that nothing like <em>The Policeman\u2019s Beard Is Half-Constructed<\/em> had ever been seen before. But Racter\u2019s patter didn\u2019t always impress. While the strange skips in logic gave off an idiosyncratic energy, the verse also made readers feel like they were eavesdropping on the rantings of a somniloquist. One critic called the 120-page collection \u201cmetaphysical poetry as interpreted by William Burroughs and William Blake, with a dyspeptic dash of Rod McKuen and Kahlil Gibran thrown in.\u201d Another critic insisted that Racter\u2019s inscrutable ingenuity revealed not a literary maverick but a \u201ccoffeehouse philosopher who knew a great deal once, but whose mind is somewhere else now.\u201d With its bright-red cover, the volume attracted a cult following. Copies soon became scarce, which only added to Racter\u2019s mystique.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Carmine Starnino: When a book&nbsp;of brazenly surrealistic poetry and prose was published in 1984, attributed to a mysterious figure named \u201cRacter,\u201d it was hard to know what to make of it.&nbsp;The Policeman\u2019s Beard Is Half-Constructedwas a fever vision of weirdness. \u201cI need electricity,\u201d declared the poet in a signature moment. \u201cI need it more than [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10370"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10370"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10370\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10371,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10370\/revisions\/10371"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10370"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10370"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10370"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}