Can 'News Poetry' save the planet?

One of the best books I've read [1] over the last two years is Jess Walter's The Financial Lives of the Poets. 

It's about a middle-aged dad named Matthew Prior who quits a solid-but-boring job as a business reporter and decides to launch his own website. The book is set in the late 2000s, when launching your own site still seemed like a good idea, sort of. [2]

This nascent media empire would report on the financial results of the Fortune 500... in iambic pentameter, or some similar flavor of verse. (Hence the name of the book.) That works out about as well as you might expect, which is how our hero ends up dealing marijuana for a living. Complications ensue, in other words. 

The book is a total hoot, and beautifully written to boot.

At the time I figured Walters was just trying to come up with the dumbest idea for a website/business humanly possible, and I thought he succeeded. Now he just appears to have been ahead of his time.

Aaron Dworkin, a lauded poet and certifiable Smart Person, is attempting to create a thing that sounds an awful lot like that idea of Matthew Prior's. Dworkin, winner of a 2005 MacArthur Genius Award, is attempting to create the Institute for Poetjournalism, and wants to put real money behind the creation of "newspoems." Per Nieman Lab's Neel Dhanesha: 

Dworkin has big plans for poetjournalism: he’s currently courting donors to fund a $150,000 prize, which he says is the largest in either poetry or journalism. And he wants to start what would essentially be a wire service for poetjournalism called the “Verse News Network,” complete with a managing editor, that would distribute newspoems to outlets around the world. 

While I admire Dworkin's optimism, I am somewhat skeptical that VNN will ultimately take down CNN. On the other hand, $150K could go a long way towards a down payment on a shack on the beach of some floating tax haven, where I can spend my remaining days sipping fruity beverages and applying SPF 1000 sunblock while waiting out the apocalypse. So I decided to give this a go, using my gen AI pals as collaborators.

To bot or not to bot

I started by asking ChatGPT to write a poem about climate change and the eventual heat death of the planet. What it came up with surprised me. The entire poem is too long to quote here, but this snippet will give you some idea:

In the gentle cradle of cosmic embrace,
Our planet spins, adorned with life's embrace,
Yet whispers echo of a looming fate,
Where balance teeters on a fragile state.

Oceans rise with silent, icy tears, 
Mountains weep as glaciers disappear, 
Forests burn in relentless, raging fire, 
As humanity's footprint climbs ever higher.

Rachel Carson, watch your back. Though not the style of poetry I am typically drawn to, AI's version of Silent Spring is impressive nonetheless. The poem ends on a hopeful note, or at least a call to action:

Let us heed the call, before it's too late, 
To mend the rifts, to change our fate, 
For in our hands lies the power to revive, 
And ensure Earth's heartbeat continues to thrive.

For task number two, I asked Google Gemini to write a poem about why parts seem to keep falling off of Boeing jetliners. Again, too long to quote in full, but this will give you an idea:

A metal bird, once so grand, 
Now takes to the sky with a shaking hand. 
Boeing, Boeing, oh mighty name, 
But your rivets rebel, a faulty game.

Panels a-flutter, like feathers astray, 
Engine cowlings adrift, in a disarray. 
Latches and levers, with nary a hold, 
A symphony of worry, a story untold.

The moral of this poem: Before your next domestic flight, get your affairs in order and buy extra travel insurance.

It seems like both ChatGPT and Gemini were trained on a lot of public domain poetry from the 19th and early 20th centuries. Much closer to Emily Dickinson than Charles Bukowski, to put it mildly.

Finally I turned to the appropriately named Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and asked it to write a limerick about how to avoid being engulfed by surging waves of fascism:

There once was a world in distress, 
As fascism grew, more or less. 
We must educate, 
And participate, 
To keep democracy's progress. 

Here's take #2:

There once was a world in a craze, 
Where fascism threatened to raze. 
We stood hand in hand, 
Made our voices expand, 
To push back the authoritarian haze. 

Couldn't have written it better myself. I can already see that $150,000 check coming my way.

Ride or die with the Incel Camino

You want actual poetry? OK, not actual poetry, but a damned fine read? Check out Drew Magary's account of the day he spent driving around San Francisco in a rented Cybertruck, and the reactions he received. [3] (Hopefully you won't run into a paywall, like a Tesla on Autopilot crashing into a parked fire truck.) As with everything Drew writes, it's funny and true.

If you'd rather watch than read, check out the video version.

Poetry might not save the planet, but at the very least reading it gives us something better to do than doom scrolling. 

How are you keeping yourself sane in these times of mass delusion? Share your tips and tactics in the comments below, or reach out to me directly: [email protected].

[1] Technically, I listened. It was an audiobook. Don't judge me.

[2] Yes, there are a few parallels here to yours truly. Maybe more than a few. But at least I didn't attempt poetry or sell dope to augment my income.

[3] Like from the woman who starts by asking, "Why would someone want to drive some bullshit ass vehicle like this?" and then declares, "I'm a medium, I talk to the other side. Can I give you a reading?"