Scott Simpson · Poetry

IV. Collaboration

The World We Mean · AI as Collaborator · Singing · IV. Collaboration

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Poem segment 1

IV. Collaboration

Calling it collaboration

still feels strange.

The machine does not care

whether the poem survives.

It does not ache

over a ruined sentence.

Still, something happens

between response and revision.

I offer direction.

It offers variation.

Back and forth.

Like throwing stones

across a frozen pond

and listening for weak places.

The process becomes interactive.

Not friendship.

Not authorship either.

More like weather

affecting a landscape.

Wind shaping dunes

without knowing

what a dune is.

And yet the shape changes.

That matters.

Because creation

has never been solitary anyway.

Writers worked with constraints

long before machines.

Found language.

Chance operations.

Margins filled by other voices.