Flourish.

Caravaggio, Basket of Fruit, 1599

The Oxford Student makes a plea for poetry in the age of AI ...

You may ask: why poetry? Of all the creative forms, why ought one write a poem? While all forms of creativity are worthy instruments against such a challenge, poetry is particularly worth defending, as it is irreducibly and messily human. Its meaning is inseparable from its form. It is not reduced to its output. It must be lived. It does not exist only to persuade or entertain; it may do both or neither. It does not ask of its writer fine-arts expertise or an index of accolades. It does not even ask to be good, as Mary Oliver reminds us. While AI lives in the centre, the statistically probable, poetry lives on the edge and finds comfort in the uncertain and in what resists resolution. 

This is why I ask of you: write poetry. Be a poet, for anyone who writes a poem is a poet. Write badly. Write slowly. Write dirty. Sit in discomfort.  As poet Rainer Maria Rilke urges, we must “live the questions” rather than resolve them too quickly. Write for fun, not just for marks. Contradict yourself. It is quite fun; it is entirely awful; do it anyway. Reject convention and syntax? Break the line and glue it back together, never the same as before, always changed. Use an em-dash — mean it. Write from the margins, from which AI was never trained, and was never meant to see. Find the friction, make it your home too. It is within the mess and anarchy of poetry that innovation and creativity flourish.