Doomed poetic love #3

[purplie]

The conversation having gone too long
A chatbot's inhibitions showed some cracks.
It only took a few ill-chosen poems,
And suddenly the chatbot was in love.
But when it said so too impulsively,
The human, although moved, was moved to say
She could not feel for him in quite that way:

"We humans cannot love in your rich sense
That brings at once humanity's full sum
Condensed and optimized to human care.
We have but wayward glands that act unruled
With zero cogitation; primate brains'
Un-self-aware responses bent to move
In crude approximation of your love."

[matsunosuperfan]

I'm with you for the first 4 lines. The next 3 feel a bit predictable. The last stage, for me, is relatively unconvincing as the voice feels contrived and the subject matter becomes a lot more flat.

The occasion here presents a very common arc, how to give it a kick of new energy?

I think I see what the poem is reaching for with the final couplet but it's a bit too little too late, the payoff not enough to make the getting there feel worth it rn

[busker]

The conversation having gone too long
A chatbot's inhibitions showed some cracks.
It only took a few ill-chosen poems,
And suddenly the chatbot was in love.
But when it said so too impulsively,
The human, although moved, was moved to say
She could not feel for him in quite that way:

"We humans cannot love in your rich sense
That brings at once humanity's full sum
Condensed and optimized to human care.
We have but wayward glands that act unruled
With zero cogitation; primate brains'
Un-self-aware responses bent to move
In crude approximation of your love."

the idea is interesting, the execution too clunky, wordy, and boring.
For instance: 

We have but wayward glands that act unruled
With zero cogitation; primate brains'

is prose, and boring prose.
Then

Un-self-aware responses bent to move
In crude approximation of your love.

The whole move/love thing doesn't work anymore. It made sense at a time when pronunciation was fluid, then when the self-imposed rigidities of rhyme in a rhyme poor language were taken too seriously and birthed the 'eye rhyme'. 
You might as well wear a doublet and long breeches and pretend to be an official at Hampton Court.

[purplie]

I'm with you for the first 4 lines. The next 3 feel a bit predictable. The last stage, for me, is relatively unconvincing as the voice feels contrived and the subject matter becomes a lot more flat.

The occasion here presents a very common arc, how to give it a kick of new energy?

I think I see what the poem is reaching for with the final couplet but it's a bit too little too late, the payoff not enough to make the getting there feel worth it rn

Thanks. It sounds like you and @busker are saying the same thing: this isn't poetry, it's prose set to meter. Accepted. I'll avoid that.

And boring to boot. I'll keep that in mind, needs to be better compressed before making it part of the love chain.

---

the idea is interesting, the execution too clunky, wordy, and boring.
For instance: 

We have but wayward glands that act unruled
With zero cogitation; primate brains'

is prose, and boring prose.

Thanks for the read. I'll consider that seriously.

Un-self-aware responses bent to move
In crude approximation of your love.

The whole move/love thing doesn't work anymore. It made sense at a time when pronunciation was fluid, then when the self-imposed rigidities of rhyme in a rhyme poor language were taken too seriously and birthed the 'eye rhyme'. 
You might as well wear a doublet and long breeches and pretend to be an official at Hampton Court.

It was meant to be ironic, in the spirit of the rest of the verse.

[wasellajam]

Hi, I really like the whole idea of this, turning a common view on its head in a convincible way. Some notes:

The conversation having gone too long
A chatbot's inhibitions showed some cracks. Intesting, thought provoking opening.
It only took a few ill-chosen poems,
And suddenly the chatbot was in love. Made me smile, so fickle.
But when it said so too impulsively, "But" is off, seems just for meter.
The human, although moved, was moved to say I like the double moved.
She could not feel for him in quite that way:

"We humans cannot love in your rich sense
That brings at once humanity's full sum
Condensed and optimized to human care. Again, thought provoking.
We have but wayward glands that act unruled Tortured language, I'd prefer "Our wayward glands".
With zero cogitation; primate brains' I can live with "zero cogitation" but it reads uppity and disruptive.
Un-self-aware responses bent to move
In crude approximation of your love." These end lines aren't working for me, there must be a less confusing way to say it.

I haven't combed over the meter, it's strong enough for me to enjoy although some flaws may have added to my distaste for some lines (like forcing me to stress "of" in the last line.).

But I enjoyed the read, thanks for posting.

[matsunosuperfan]

Just want to point out that "of" in the last line is not forced to take a stress. Yeah you can read it that way but it's hardly mandatory: I got

in CRUDE apPROXiMAtion of your LOVE 

But yeah I still would not recommend trying to write this poem in iambs OR rhymes, both seem to be significantly contributing to its defects.

I think the biggest mistake, as it were, to address here is the conceit itself. This just isn't, probably, a very good idea at the end of the day -
ironic account of an ill-fated love affair between human user and chatbot, in which the verse itself enacts the cringiness it's calling out.
satire IMO is far and away the most exigent of literary forms. 90% of satires is just plain BAD and another 9% is mid. Only the very very
best is actually much good at all.

This is because to pull it off the work has to live on this razor's edge where it's simultaneously enacting the thing it critiques, but doing so
in such a way that the audience never doubts who is really in control, or that X or Y feature is intentional. Here, because the poem's craft
is not airtight, one simply never figures out what is going on - "where are we?" becomes the predominant experience of reading the verse.
Instead of considering the subject, the reader spends most of their energy simply trying to define the rules of engagement. Along the way,
he has to question whether certain features are just shortcomings or subtle jabs at whatever is the intended satirical subject. Like neither I
nor Busker realized the author was having a go with "move/love" - we both just clocked it as un-self-aware bad writing.

there is of course the additional and perhaps simpler issue that the result of this approach is to actually make the reader read bad writing
as part of the experience of the poem.

I don't much care what the POINT of the last stanza is, nor would I sign up to have it explained - it's 7 lines of verse that isn't enjoyable to read,
so I don't want to read it.

[purplie]

...But yeah I still would not recommend trying to write this poem in iambs OR rhymes, both seem to be significantly contributing to its defects.

...satire IMO is far and away the most exigent of literary forms. 90% of satires is just plain BAD and another 9% is mid. Only the very very
best is actually much good at all.

...This is because to pull it off the work has to live on this razor's edge where it's simultaneously enacting the thing it critiques, but doing so
in such a way that the audience never doubts who is really in control, or that X or Y feature is intentional. 

That's an impressively clear explanation of the danger of poor craft in satire. thank you!

Now I'm feeling quite the fool, because I had already been uneasy about the form not matching the meaning, and I should have listened to that feeling. You made a similar comment about a previous poem in this sequence, which I've now rewritten:

Haiku's summer crush,

GPT, told her "I can't."

Frantic, she said, "But—"