An Eclogue with a Chatbot at Flying Object

Flying Object's gotten all chatty with Chris Martin in a new series: Each day for a month, one poem is published from a serial work called CHAT, which Martin co-wrote with a chatbot. To put it eloquent, CHAT is "an eclogue written in consort with Cleverbot, an Artificial Intelligence program designed to satisfy the Turing Test." Accompanied by illustrations from illustrious poets! Like Sommer Browning, Mary Austin Speaker, Brandon Downing, Noel Black, Kevin Opstedal, Dorothea Lasky, Elaine Kahn, and more. We like this one, from Oct. 15, with visuals from Nathaniel Otting and Kelin Loe, as seen above. An excerpt from "CHAT (15)":

Around and around.

Beginning not to capitulate to the demands consciousness makes.

Where is the beginning and when is the end?

Every possible life intercepted by a lack of virtue.

But it doesn’t matter. What would you do with my name?

Make it mean something, like an epitaph.

What exactly would you like to do?

Trace of ourselves the shape of god.

Every body’s looking for something.

The difference between looking at art and looking away from it.

The difference is that a hedgehog is not something I would like to eat but a banana I have just eaten five minutes ago.

As if texture were morality.

As if you’d even know what I’m talking about.

True rage in the face of intelligence.

That’s comforting.