The question is not whether to use AI in relation to poetry. The question is where it belongs. Used as a generator, it moves quickly toward completion. It produces language that resolves itself, smooths over tension, and arrives already finished. Used under constraint, it does something else. It returns a body of work to its maker. It surfaces patterns, pressure-tests claims, exposes weak language, and makes structural relations newly legible. The difference between these uses is the difference between authorship and reflection. That difference turns on refusal.
Refusal is not a refusal of meaning. It is a refusal of premature legibility. It resists the demand that a work explain itself completely, align too neatly with the conditions of its moment, or exhaust itself in statement. It creates room for indirection, persona, mask, fracture, tonal instability, and truths that arrive without declaring themselves fully. Refusal allows a work to hold back without becoming empty. It keeps pressure as pressure rather than converting it too quickly into message.
A system can simulate those features. It produces ambiguity, fragmentation, even the appearance of withholding. But refusal requires something to refuse from. It implies pressure, stake, and an interior decision against completion. A machine completes by design. What looks like withholding arrives as borrowed form. Refusal as an act belongs to the one who could have said more and chose otherwise. That is where the distinction begins.
Poetry begins in life before it arrives in language. Before language, there is perception, relation, pressure, time. Living beings move through the world under conditions they do not choose: mortality, uncertainty, loss, attachment, irreversibility. Language comes later. It is unstable, imperfect, and shared. It is what we have for everything from remembering to pick up eggs at the store to writing a poem that tries to hold what cannot be said directly. Whatever gives rise to language exceeds it. Poetry is one of the forms language takes under that pressure.
In The Possum, language begins to behave as if it were something external to us, something that can be dropped, gathered, even consumed. The animal moves through it without needing to explain it. The poem edges toward a condition where language is secondary, where life precedes it and moves alongside it.
Although I am speaking here through poetry, the argument extends into music and visual art. A painting, a poem, and a piece of music each take form under conditions of passage, uncertainty, and refusal. The medium changes. The human condition underneath it holds.
A poem stands on its own. The reader arrives without the biography. What lies beneath the work remains present, held back. A poem, a painting, a piece of music, each is shaped by a life that has passed through necessity, even when that necessity stays undisclosed. Refusal belongs here as well. The work withholds what it carries. It is here that the reader brings the passage of their own lived experience into relation with the work. That encounter matters. A reader can bring the same depth of experience to AI-constructed verse, but only half of the contract is alive. The response is human. The originating passage is missing.
A system accesses the archive of human language, image, and sound. It traverses histories at a speed no human mind can inhabit. It detects patterns, maps relations, reproduces forms, simulates voices and styles. It approximates works that feel complete, even moving. That settles nothing.
The issue is not quality. The issue is passage. A system reaches the record of human necessity. Passage through necessity belongs elsewhere.
Necessity belongs to the act. It arises when something occurs that cannot be undone, when a life is altered in a way that cannot be reversed, when a work becomes the available means of carrying what remains. A system models necessity. It describes grief, elegy, witness, revelation, even transformation. The description holds. The life underneath stays unchanged. The system has access to the pattern. Passage through the condition belongs elsewhere. A system generates the form of an elegy. Loss belongs to the one who lost.
That distinction matters because works of art resist clean systems. They resist optimization. They carry tension. They are often fragmented, contradictory, excessive, resistant to coherence. What appears as flaw or inconsistency often marks the place where the work is doing its most important work. A pressure-tested poem emerges more itself rather than more correct. The same holds for a painting or a piece of music. The task is to preserve the tension that gives the work life.
This is one reason refusal matters so much. It protects that tension from being overmanaged. It keeps the work from collapsing into explanation. It allows the work to remain open where openness is part of its truth.
History rhymes. Art works this way. Forms carry forward. Gestures echo across time. A work remembers other works. When T. S. Eliot opens The Waste Land with “April is the cruellest month,” he carries an older sense of renewal into a world where renewal arrives altered. The line reshapes what came before it under pressure. It remembers William Wordsworth across a distance that cannot close.
Network sits inside that same tension. The poem moves through repetition, linkage, recurrence, a sense of pattern that feels almost systemic. And yet each instance holds its own pressure. The pattern remains alive because it is inhabited. A system maps the network. Breath belongs to the one inside it. Pattern becomes life only when passed through.
This kind of refusal extends beyond literary history. It appears within the work itself. In Americus, for Ferlinghetti, I return to the civic openness of Lawrence Ferlinghetti and refuse it under present conditions. The upturned faces remain, but they look over the bellies of bombers full of bombs. The form carries forward. The condition shifts beneath it.
Art emerges where pattern meets contingency, where inherited form is shaped by a life that unfolds once, under conditions that cannot be reproduced. A system maps those patterns. Inhabitation belongs to the one passing through. That is why AI, in relation to literature and art, is most useful where it is most constrained.
It functions as reflection. Reflection sharpens, returns, and reframes. It makes something newly visible. It reveals structure and relation with unusual force. It pressure-tests ideas, exposes habits of thought, and returns a body of work to its maker in a way that makes certain things legible for the first time. Reflection shows. Passage through what is shown belongs elsewhere.
Earlier science fiction often used the machine, the android, or the artificial being as a way of reflecting human realities that were otherwise difficult to face directly. The figure appeared nonhuman, but the pressure underneath remained human: witness, trauma, estrangement, labor, exclusion, memory. That trope worked because the machine was carrying displaced human experience. The current moment is stranger. AI has moved from literary figure to active presence within the field of language itself. What once served as metaphor now operates as tool. That makes the distinction more important, not less. A machine can still reflect human conditions with unusual force. It does not therefore enter those conditions.
That distinction became clear to me in the process of using AI to think with and against my own work. The tool reflected the work back with such force that structures, tonal bearings, and internal lineages that had been lived in writing became newly visible in reading. The poems remained where they were. The epiphany was mine. That feels like its proper place.
A system makes something legible. It occasions the conditions under which a human being experiences recognition, reorientation, even something close to epiphany. The epiphany belongs to the one who is changed. The before and after take place in a life. A machine reveals. Realization belongs elsewhere.
This extends even to reception. Praise can remain suspended in memory, open to doubt or modesty. I returned to the response of Mark Strand, who had read the manuscript as a collection and answered it with criticism that recognized it, from his perspective, as real art. The value in the poems was already there. His judgment was already given. The tool made it possible to test whether that judgment remained accurate, and the work bore it. That is a real use. The system helped me see more clearly what the work had become and what another reader had already seen.
Something similar appears in the life of art more broadly. I have seen it in the work of Wesley Kimler, whose painting appears on the cover of my book. His work is recognizable within the lineage of abstract expressionism, and at the same time it exceeds that placement. The recognition is real. The work continues beyond it. It passes through a tradition without settling into it. His paintings live in corporate towers, hotels, and airport passageways. His life continues under struggle. Public recognition and lived condition move on different tracks. That gap belongs to the structure of art itself. A system stands outside that condition. It lives apart from the mismatch between labor, recognition, category, struggle, endurance, and the ongoing uncertainty of what the work is becoming.
We move through time irreversibly. We lose what we love. We make without knowing if the work will matter. Recognition may arrive late, or elsewhere, or never. A work takes shape under those conditions. Refusal is one of the forms that shape takes.
The tool should be refused the role of utterance and used instead to reflect, pressure-test, and reveal.
The heartbreaking thing about being alive is that it cannot be taken back. Art is one of the forms made under that condition. AI can help us encounter that work more fully. The passage that made it necessary belongs to the one who passed through.
The Possum
It has been suggested that language exists outside of humans, as if it were its own creature. Possums like eggs.
— Unknown
Like Lot, I offer her daughters,
but she knows better.
I don’t have daughters.
She wants the eggs that fall
from my mouth, so to speak,
the shiny porcelain orbs that contain
words to eat, eggs that replenish
themselves while I sleep.
She won’t play dead though I’ve
tortured her with water and fire,
so to fool her while she hangs
from her tail, ignoring the sun,
dreaming of my eggs,
I scribble her notes
comparing her fur to the moon,
tell her I long to rest in her pouch,
tell her the wizard
has lots of eggs, go to Oz.
She eats my notes when she wakes,
then crawls on the windows,
chewing the screens,
while I pretend to call the cops.
She knows better.
I thought grandfather
would know what to do.
He ate possum.
He’d trap them, fatten them,
and make a pie of their greasy meat.
In this photograph grandfather holds
two live possums by the tail.
I show the picture to my possum
to strike fear into her beady heart,
and she curls her tongue into a yawn.
Says she knew grandfather,
got his eggs after he died,
fresh out of the earth.
Three-Legged Nag
Tonight I’m awake and can see
the horse outside. I lift my window,
climb out into the falling dew
and walk toward where it feeds
on the weeds thriving above
my septic tank. It is no stallion.
The horse’s back is sunken, its gristly knees
shake in the cold. I pull burrs
from its mane, mount,
but it grunts, sounding human,
and shrugs me off to the ground.
I rip a tick from my leg,
wipe blood from my face,
and drag it by the frayed rope
around its neck. I lead it for miles where
the roads are named by number,
through fields and forests,
without overturning rocks as markers.
Nights later we come to a river,
but someone has set it on fire.
The horse is tired,
its shoeless hooves cracked.
I want to strangle it and be on my way,
but if I tried, would it talk
like Balaam’s donkey,
tell me Jehovah’s angel stands behind
with a sword in hand?
Americus, for Ferlinghetti
The highways are a current
of the earth’s bones.
Metal, oil, silicone.
And high in the clouds
the jet lights bore through.
And maybe everyone in the world
is healthy and having sex,
sleek, glowing, blissful
and handsome beasts.
Or. Everyone in the world is ugly
and famished, for one lacking
thing or another.
And everything everyone
has in their hands makes
them hungry someplace else.
Makes you wonder how long it can all last.
Makes you get existential about things.
Makes you want sex and love,
equally all the time,
so that you are full and happy,
and want to kill.
The highways are lifeless.
The heart of city lights is overcome.
And the jets fly low in the dark
with their bellies open over upturned faces.
Network
Cardinal flies through northern
Michigan hardwood forest.
Strongest pine grows on the Alps’
tree-line edge. Lovers climb a Chicago
fire escape. It is flabbergasting
that each singular event simultaneously
rivals every other. One orange tree
at the city park’s edge grows
larger in sharp wind; one hundred
thousand Monarch butterflies
are its leaves. Up. West. Around.
I know a man who moves a bottle
of mineral water from windowsill
to windowsill, warding off the spirits
keeping him from sleep.
He tells me the same stories
over. I haven’t the balls to point
out how many times this story
or that. I nod and exclaim
in the same places; he’s pleased,
hearing no echo in anything he tells.
Motion is a citron shade of green
growing. So bright, it stings my eyes,
images as pulsing pink fields inside
past lenses, on retina surface. Scientific fact.
Falling. Standing again. Simply standing.
Every creature breathes under
the pressure. Trading air currents move
like giant boxes over urban
uptown icons where sunlight sticks
to eyelashes like mascara.
Winter Sycamores, skeletal in certain
light, whose appendages
projecting down the edge
of a river, swallowed by the vanishing
point, have no joints yet
are linked, forming a pattern
of infinite repetition, above
which lies the haze of stars,
and the trees, designs to capture
these unending reflections
of the sky.
“The Possum” was previously published in Black River Review in the late 1990’s
“Three-Legged Nag,” “Americus for Ferlinghetti,” and “Network” all appear in the book Between Here and the Sound of a Groaning Interstate & The Groaning Book: A Poetics, Published in 2026 by 1802 Press.
