An Apology and a Holiday
The jubremony at the library
A Saturday apology for all Friday readers of this week’s Some Flowers Soon: the first version I published contained some accidental bonus material at the end, in the form of working notes from Helen Vendler’s essay on Shakespeare’s Sonnets. And if you did scroll down that far, you will also have gone past the actual NOTES section, which should have contained this link to the fresh and arresting opening pages of Rosalind Brown’s Practice, on the University of East Anglia’s New Writing site: https://www.newwriting.net/2024/03/practice/
So, apologies! It was a busy day at Some Flowers Soon HQ, and the production team have been sent on a refresher course, which involves simply reading and rereading the greatest printing error ever. They’ll be sending out a corrected email and have updated the online version:
This also seems a good moment to say that I’ll be taking a break next Friday for the Easter weekend. Any free subscribers who want to try the full archive over the holidays are very welcome to click here for a two-week trial:
https://someflowerssoon.substack.com/twoweekfree
And anyone who wants some reading material for April Fool’s Day is invited to revisit this not-entirely-factual post from last year — though I have a horrible feeling that ChatGPT might actually be able to respond like this to The Waste Land allusions now…
"It is April, After All"
I was hoping to write another post this week on AI and The Waste Land, but ran out of time. So instead I tried feeding ChatGPT a few questions from the poem to see how it would take them as ice-breakers. At the back of my mind was the famous occasion in 1964 when Groucho Marx met T.S. Eliot for dinn…
Has anyone ever attempted to use the jubremony at the library as the basis for a poetry workshop? Obviously, the workshop lead should be entirely straight-faced throughout…
Thank you for not one but two good laughs today.
I was thoroughly taken in by that AF at the time :/
Anecdotally - unless I'm using the wrong prompts - Chat GPT still can't write anything approaching "free" verse. If you mention the word poem all you get is jingle jangle couplets (unless you specify, say, 'vilannelle', in which case you get a jingle jangle vilanelle). I'm sure it'll get there...