Sorry, AI: You Can't Do Me Like Me!

Had to do it! Finally (inspired by a friend who tried it too) I couldn't resist asking AI if it could write some poetry in the style of Rosemary Nissen-Wade.  It first described my style:

Rosemary Nissen-Wade’s poems often balance lyrical beauty with grounded honesty. Her voice is intimate yet unsentimental — reflective, conversational, and steeped in everyday detail that subtly opens into something transcendent. 

I think that's quite accurate, actually. (If a bit pompously expressed, in the speech of academia.)

But then came the poems. It offered one, then asked if I'd like variations, to which I agreed. I did lots and lots of laughing out very loud at all of them! OMG, they are SO pretentious. So disgustingly sentimental (as distinct from real sentiment). And essentially meaningless.

Anyone who believes I could really commit these is off my friends list pronto! Here is the rest of the conversation [with interpolations in square brackets, and my final comments at the end]:

Here’s a poem written in that spirit.

The Quiet Between Things

I make tea the slow way,

waiting on the kettle’s rise and fall,

the hiss before it sings.

Outside, the sky forgets its colour —

a kind of blue that gave up trying.

You’d laugh, I think,

to see me tend to such small rituals:

folding silence into corners,

placing words like cutlery

so nothing feels left undone.

Some days the air itself remembers —

your hand brushing crumbs from the table,

the sound of a spoon against porcelain.

Not grief, exactly. More

the habit of having belonged.

The kettle quiets.

Steam curls,

and for a moment everything waits

just long enough

to be forgiven.

[Also, the person described just ain't me! I drink coffee, not tea. For the occasional herbal tea, I use teabags (no such thing as a teapot in my house). And I am in general very, very undomesticated.]

Would you like me to shade the tone more toward her earlier, mystical style, or her later, more autobiographical and reflective voice?

Yes, please.

Here are two new poems, each echoing a different facet of her voice, while staying short and self-contained.

Earlier, more mystical

Between Worlds, the Kitchen Light

The hour hangs loose as a sleeve

between dusk and whatever comes next.

The fridge hums its small mantra.

Streetlights test their halos

against the last, unwilling blue.

In the sink, one glass,

a thin lip of shadow around it.

Steam rises from the kettle

like a spirit that has forgotten

which world it belonged to first.

Somewhere a dog barks once,

as if naming an intruder

no one else can see.

The radio flickers, not on, not off —

just breathing in the wall.

And the air grows thick

with things that almost were:

words never spoken,

hands not taken,

the faintest scent of rain.

Stay still, says the moment.

Do not choose.

Let the veil be a curtain of light

you do not draw, only notice,

as you stand there,

warming your hands on nothing.

Later, more autobiographical/reflective

Learning the Edges

The mirror keeps offering

the same soft stranger:

my mother’s mouth,

my father’s wary eyes,

a neck unused to necklaces.

These days the body bargains.

One walk for two naps,

three tablets for a night without storms.

I write lists and lose them,

then write what I lost in a poem instead.

Friends vanish into hospital corridors,

into distance, into silence that hums

like a busy hive behind a wall.

We message hearts and jokes,

little bandages of light.

I am gentler with the girl I was,

her fierce, embarrassing hopes,

her willingness to shatter for love.

She did the best she knew.

So do I, with smaller gestures.

Most mornings I sit by the same window,

count magpies, name the colours of the sky.

If a line arrives, I thank it.

If it doesn’t, I thank the kettle,

the chair that still remembers my shape,

the day that came anyway.

[Then another suggestion, to which I also agreed, produced the following.]

Here are two more, one leaning into a haibun/haiku texture, one a longer free verse piece, both only inspired by her style rather than quoting or reproducing it .

Haibun / haiku-inflected

River Road

The road curves like a question the river keeps asking. Morning mist lifts slowly off the paddocks, revealing small, practical miracles: a cow nosing her calf to standing, spider-silk guying fence to fence. Somewhere a magpie revises its song, swapping one bright note for another, as if today requires a different key .

Driving, there is that old feeling again, that the day is only loosely attached to the world. The tyres hum their low mantra. A thought rises — about someone long gone, about something almost said — then slips back into the body, unspoken. The sky opens a little more. The river, beside you, keeps pretending to stay in one place .

roadside shrine –

a wilted plastic rose

still catching light 

Longer free verse

What the Notebook Knows

The notebook on the table

has begun to sag at the corners,

pages foxed by years of

grocery lists beside metaphors,

phone numbers beside the moon .

Between “book dentist”

and “don’t forget basil”

a line about your hands appears,

and suddenly the whole day

tilts toward another lifetime.

Age does that now:

slides trapdoors into Thursdays,

lets the past fall through

like a stone into clear water,

sending rings across the present.

Some names blur.

Some wounds don’t.

Yet the pen still finds its way

to the next blank space,

stubborn as a weed in good soil.

The kettle clicks off.

Magpies argue in the yard.

On the page, a sentence waits

for its last word to arrive —

the way a heart waits longer

than it should,

and calls that patience.

[Some of the words it gave me are not even in my usual vocabulary, e.g. 'guying' and 'foxing'.]

The style, supposedly like mine, is in fact very like what it produced as supposedly in the style of the friend who tried it first and gave me the idea. I wonder where it is really getting its material from? Not just from the poet it is trying to imitate, obviously. 

If I stop laughing, I might puke.