“It needn’t be tinder, this juncture of the year” Conor O’Callaghan – January Drought
I – Hand-wringing…
Tinseltown they called it The Hollywood sign above it On mountain and canyons covered With scrub like gasoline tinder Rich palaces of dreams rendered To which many young locusts aspired But Santa Ana winds have burned Those houses to naught but ash Chimneys only gravestones to the cash Will Angelinos now have learned Money, for Nature is no match Challenge it and there’s a catch Will L.A. be a lesson to us all That Damocles’ sword’s about to fall…
II – Thunderbolt slinging…
“Come friendly bombs and rain on Slough” Quipped English Poet Laureate Enough with all this rational debate No one heeds “We the People” now Let Mar-a-Lago flooded be With Trump inside preferably Let insurance baulk at rebuilding The Palace-ades of rich and famous And let’s see what Trump really does When Global Warming’s truly a thing So unlike wise old King Canute The science is no longer moot And yes, for sure we all will suffer Till Nature trumps the monstrous duffer…
Andrew Wilson, 2025
Over at dVerse Poets Pub, Laura Bloomsbury in Meeting the Bar: Critique and Craft invites us to write a Palinode in which two verses take contrary views and around a quotation relating to the New Year. I chose the Conor O’Callaghan one which seems almost prescient to the L.A. fires that are occurring so early in the New Year…
Meadow Argus / Photographed in Solomon Islands / Michael Sammut
Adornment to attract an amour Sets of eyes bigger than a bird’s belly To scare off avian appetites And what sex is this butterfly beauty Flamboyant female like those of our species Or Cock of the Walk like most birds do Or did a Creationist God get carried away With his paintbrush in an inspired moment…
Over at dVerse Poets Pub, msjadeli in Haibun Monday, invites us to write a Burnt Haibun, a reductive poetry form that distils a longer prose poem down to a shorter one and finally to Haiku. The emboldened words below form the second poem and likewise with the second one distilled down to the haiku.
It would have been nice, given the New Year ‘n all, not to have to have written this particular piece but sadly there is no end in sight and awareness needs to be kept alive… Trying to understand/explain the conflict which this poem describes has been both an internal and external journey for me over many years and when I finally found the accounts of the term Hasbara – everything fell into place and I understood a great deal…
However – a Happy New Year to everyone at the pub!
HASBARA
It is hard to translate Hasbara once it would have been called Propaganda but for the truly unpalatable you need asubtler, more insidious word so hasbara, nearly enough means explaining
You want to explain why one people are entitled to take the land of another people who have lived there for two thousand years – hasbara why two peoples genetically identical are not in fact equal paint one of them as evil with hasbara you want to justify how large farms can suck the water from the wells of smaller neighbours don’t mention it that’s no part of hasbara but happy, sun-bronzed people claiming their homeland with confidence that’s hasbara.
The world attacked us and theyattacked us first we have the right to defend ourselves hasbara they are evil – we are good hasbara
Hasbara treads carefully hasbara paints a picture hasbara targets the diaspora and the politicians where they live hasbara accumulates in the brains of its targets in the corners of the internet and on the pages of newspapers hasbaramakes lies palatable but hasbara cannot paper over too big a crack between reality and the lies genocide is too big to hide but hasbara breeds hubris and overreach and years of hasbara can deflate instantly like a burst balloon
Explain that to the purveyors of Hasbara
Hasbara – once called Propaganda a subtler, more insidious word means explaining
why take the land of people who lived there for two thousand years why genetically identical are not equal – paint them as evil – hasbara happy, sun-bronzed people claiming their homeland that’s hasbara.
The world attacked us first we have the right they are evil – we are good hasbara treads carefully paints a picture targets the diaspora and politicians accumulates in brains the internet on pages of newspapers hasbara makes lies palatable but genocide is too big to hide hasbara breeds hubris overreach years of hasbara deflate like a burst balloon
Explain that to the purveyors of Hasbara…
Hasbaraexplaining they are evil – we are good a burst balloon
It is 18 months since my last essay exploring AI back in 2023 and there have been many developments since then – certainly more and more people, from poets of my acquaintance to businesses, have explored and made use of AI in one form or another and the industry is full of startups offering AI solutions in all sorts of areas such as creating training videos in which you prime the AI with the content you want delivered and the AI concocts slides with a voiceover or even a fully imagined video trainer to articulate your training needs.
Public awareness has continued to grow, the alarm over AI taking away jobs, or taking over the world and eradicating humans is perhaps less hysterical and the debate more focused. One way in which this is happening is that writers and artists have challenged the AI companies for the currently unregulated and voracious use of their (the creatives) material in training the AI’s LLM’s or Large Language Models. These are the vast bodies of existing work, written and visual, that are fed to AI’s and from which they both learn and plagiarise when prompted to generate an image or a piece of writing “in the style of”. When I first started exploring Generative AI, these ethical battlelines were not so apparent. Still, now we must seriously consider the ethical questions raised by how we choose to use AI – especially when we reference existing artwork or literature. You may feel that the damage is already done, the genie already out of the bottle and that there is no point in bolting the stable door after the horse has bolted, but the laws need changing to protect the copywriter issues advanced by creatives and perhaps there will emerge a statute of limitations so that older work, out of copywrite is usable whilst currently, copyrighted material is either out of bounds or attracts a fee for the use of… Below is an illustration I tried and purely for experiment, I asked for it to be “in the style of” Studio Ghibli – a Japanese animation studio based in Koganei, Tokyo. The exact prompt was “Alice in Wonderland at the Court of the Red Queen in the style of studio ghibli directed by Hayao Miyazaki“
As you can see, Alice is there, in a dining room sumptuous enough to be that of the Red Queen but there are no other characters present and the AI (Midjourney) has become fixated on the Fly Agaric toadstools that Alice found the hookah-smoking Caterpillar sitting on. Does this image owe much to Studi Ghibli and Director Hayao Miyazaki – it certainly could be an animation style – I don’t know his work well enough – I just saw the style in a list of things you could prompt AI with and decided to experiment – but the fact that the AI recognised the name of Studio Ghibli means that it was trained, at some point, by looking at the studio’s work…
So I have decided, for three reasons, to be more circumspect about my use of “in the style of”. Firstly out of fairness to current creatives, secondly because it remains as difficult as ever to get AI to produce the image exactly as you have in your mind’s eye, and lastly I have made less use of AI images to accompany poems – in part because the brilliance of them, not only illustrates the poem but threatens to eclipse or distract from it. However, whilst I am a competent artist in some respects, I am not an illustrator with a wide range of drawing skills and so below, I am going to show you the blend of AI-generated image elements and their combination in PhotoShop to arrive at an image I had in mind for a commissioned illustration. My friend Melissa Lemay, is launching an online journal called Collaborature to showcase collaborative poems and works of literature as well as interviews with authors – she sent me her mission statement and gave me carte blanche to produce an illustration for the launch…
My idea is to have a woman absorbed in reading a book with a “thought bubble” rising up into a night sky showing the moon, and a rocket on it’s way to the moon – all inspired by her reading…
To begin with, I decided on a black-and-white illustration with “drawn” elements combined, which made it slightly easier to achieve consistency. Firstly I wanted a young woman but drawn “in the style of” the E.H.Shepard illustration from “Now We Are Six” by A.A. Milne. – or rather, I wanted her in the pose below, which is not quite the same thing…
The results below, despite what I thought to be a very detailed prompt describing the young woman, her clothes and her pose, was not right…
Black and white line drawing of a young woman wearing a sleeveless dress with hemline just above the knee lying on her stomach elbows stretched out and head supported by hands reading a book propped up in front of her legs bent at the knee and bent upwards in the style of E.H.Shepard
Cetainly I think the style has little to do with E.H.Shepard and in the lower left picture, the young woman, far from being excited, her imagination fired by reading, has fallen asleep! I tried making variations but nothing worked any better so I then decided to try for a picture of a young girl instead and got the result below.
Black and white line drawing of a young girl wearing a sleeveless mini-dress with hemline just above the knee lying flat on her stomach head supported by hands reading a book propped up in front of her legs bent back and over her knees in the style of E.H.Shepard
Once again we have a sleeping beauty, but I decided I could accept the top left image. Next I wanted to have a thought bubble form the girl, featuring a rocket to the moon inspired in the girl’s imagination, by her reading. I was remembering the Moon face in the 1902 film A Trip to the Moon (French: Le voyage dans la lune) by pioneer film director Georges Méliès.
And so I used the prompt “Black and white line drawing of moon against a black background in the style of Georges Melies” to obtain this:-
Nothing like George Melies’ image so no qualms about using the quite straight forward “drawing-style” moon. Next to a rocket, and I have always loved the rocket (was it inspired by the German V2 rockets?) from The Adventures of Tintin, the comics series by Belgian cartoonist Hergé.
And so using this prompt “Black and white rocket against a dark grey background in the style of Tintin Explorers on the Moon” I obtained these images from Midjourney.
Once again, I don’t think the similarity of the rockets warrants the term plagiarism so much as “inspired by…” and I was happy to go with the bottom right image.
Now that I had all the elements, it was time to start assembling them in Adobe PhotoShop – this process is essentially like building a collage except that you can go back and work on each layer ad infinitum, resizing, adjusting the tones, cropping etc. even rearranging the order of the layers – so what hides what…
Having decided on the size and proportion of the Background, I placed the girl before adding a Gradient layer for the night sky. Then, having pasted multiple copies of the Mission Statement text, I placed a text layer in white text so that it fades out at the bottom of the picture but is readable against the black of the sky. I then brought the girl to the front again as the white letters were going over her.
The white letters looked too strong so I increased their transparency to tone them down. Next I added the thought bubbles giving them white edges to stand out and then placed the moon into the large bubble.
I could have added the rocket within the thought bubble, like the moon, but I thought it added to the portrayal of the act of imagination if it came from outside the thought bubble – as if it had come from a different bubble perhaps… Lastly, the rocket looked too static and so I added some “motion streaks” to complete the picture.
So there you have it – each element of the picture was produced by Midjourney generative AI, yet I could never have got an AI to see and conform to the design I had in mind and so I had to assemble them in the way I wanted, after the event and this is one way in which I think AI can be used to aid the graphic designer – after all, collage of existing print material is a very old tradition…
The shepherd Attis who killed himself for shame because the Goddess Cybelle forbade him to look at anyone other than her – but he was weak – lay with a nymph – died beneath a pine Cybelle brought him back to life, now faithful – pine log now holy…
Andrew Wilson, 2024
Attis died by castrating himself beneath a pine tree following the awful wrath of Cybelle, a Roman Goddess of Fertility whereupon she had a change of heart and brought him back to life – needless to say he did not stray again… But this myth was celebrated by Romans (strange but true) by the bearing of a Pine log through the streets – Pines now being sacred to Attis. Christianity often subsumed old festivals into itself and this is one possible origin of the Yule Log… I wrote more about it here.
or Conifer/Fir tree(s) imagery, mythology, memories etc
must be an unrhymed poem
no specific meter
one stanza only
10 lines with no paragraphs
graduating from 1 to 10 syllables
[add lines 11 & 12 with just 2 syllables per line – my optional extra]
Thus the first line is monosyllabic; the second line has two syllables, and so on, until there’s ten syllables on the tenth line (then reverts to 2 syllables for lines 11 & 12 if you want this optional extra). The outline of your poem takes the concrete shape of a fir tree. Centre it on the page else left or right aligned it’s only half a tree! (X=syllables not words)
At five or six years old on holiday near Swanage we watched TV for the first time and what we saw was I Love Lucy an American sit-com my Dad was not a fan American rubbish he declaimed but with a longer view the series was quite bold ahead of it’s time depicting as it did an inter-racial marriage that might seem commonplace today back then caused moral outrage but we British children more taken up with the novel medium saw nothing amiss in the union of the eponymous Lucy and her husband Desi…
The eponymous Great Wave circles the centre of the woodcut in an exaggerated piling up of water as when two waves pass through each other and multiply their height and over-face themselves.
We are far out to sea off Kanagawa as we can see once we notice the dwarfed Mount Fuji placed as if the wave is about to crash down on it spume dropping like snowflakes onto the snowclad mountain top. The mountain once noticed. is made up of different curves – those of a volcanic cone and not these monstrous imaginings of the Great Wave.
We can be forgiven for not noticing a whole mountain, not least because the same limited palette of Prussian, Cerulean, and Sky Bue with hints of black are used throughout with a mushroom coloured sky louring over the distant Fuji camouflaging its presence – hidden in plain sight – even when framed by the action.
On further examination, we may realise we have missed two fishing boats lying flush in the curve of the troughs between the Great Wave and its siblings each boat crewed by ten souls in peril on the deep – eight clinging for dear life in the stern of each boat and two for some unaccountable reason further for’ard. Certainly these boats and fishermen are in peril, as are all seafarers though I am not convinced their craft are not designed to weather such waves as these shipwrights know their seas…
The Great Wave of Kanagawa is an artist’s conceit a representation of possible peril. to capture the imagination of a people who live in permanent peril – from volcanoes, earthquakes, and they gave us the very word tsunami and this representation of perfectly frozen in place peril is the epitome of Japanese style – an image that like few others is known around the world printed on bags and worn on T shirts or simply hung on walls from Fuji to Finland from Tokyo to Timbuktu a universal icon of the raw power the peril and heedless beauty of the sea – indeed of all of nature before which all we mortal men may tremble and do defy at our peril…
It is OLN – Open Link Night over at dVerse Poets Pub which is hosted tonight by Mish. As a mini prompt she shared Katsushika Hokusai’s “Tiger in the Snow” which may have been his final creation. But I had already written an Ekphrastic poem about Hokusai’s most famous image “The Great Wave Off Kanagawa” and it is that poem I chose to share tonight. it was written in my writing group where we considered the woodcut…
I am an old Dragon To be precise an Old Draconian Old in man years anyway Almost three score years and ten Though that is probably young As dragons go – joined in ‘62 Leaving class of ‘66.
We wore a uniform of Rufty-tufty, navy-blue corduroy No namby-pamby “How To Train Your Dragon” this… Boys with siblings from older clutches Inherited the faded battle dress style Uniforms – wore them with pride.
We learned to swim in a river Conquering our fear of Willow roots Reaching for our doggy paddling legs And on the playing fields in late summer A whole barrel of cherries would appear For our delectation and at another time Also, we presumed, the gift of an Old Dragon A crate of pomegranates appeared To introduce our tastebuds to the exotic.
Seasonally, we played marbles Tricky enough when our playground Sloped from all directions To a central drain and my best friend Espying the gathered horde collected there Lifted the grate and clawed up Aggies, bottle tops and common spirals But lost a nail replacing The heavy cast iron piece Causing blood to flow Unfelt with the shock.
Most Dragons scions Of the rich and good of the land Knowing their path to wealth Would be smoothed at every step But I came from humbler stock Yet my parents, believing that Rubbing shoulders with the best – Though not a comfortable experience For the young dragon, I was- Suffering mildly from imposter syndrome – Would alone be preparation For life’s later battles They scrimped and saved That I might attend The Dragon School, Oxford…
The last time that the president-elect was indisputably seen in public, was at his inaugural rally at which a third presumed unsuccessful attempt on his life resulted in his being whisked away and out of sight. After a night of panic by his supporters, a reassuring video was released of the now President, sitting up in his hospital bed and raising a fist in a defiant gesture. Thereafter, the POTUS made no live appearances, his team stating that three attempts on his life were quite enough. The irony was that the techniques which had served the president during his candidacy for re-election, to smear opponents, were now used to supplant the presence of the ageing and unstable would-be dictator. Deep fakes, AI-generated speeches flowed forth, for God knows, there were enough speeches to train the AIs in the rambling, vitriolic, and emotion-soaked appeal that was the President’s trademark. The crew that had pushed the president forward over the last four years, not to mention his long-suffering wife, breathed a sigh of relief and prompted the AIs to generate a more coherent presidency which went exactly to plan…
Winter has come forth freezing forever the fruit of misbegotten dreams…
Two types of wind encircle the earth Trades, Westerlies and Easterlies Blow steady and dependable
They let wind sailors venture forth West-East, East-West, trade routes they plied. Moving Saharan red dust fabled
Steering the cyclone’s rushing curse Yet land too creates strong breezes Sometimes too, quite seasonable
Hot, cold, blowing for all they’re worth Wet, dry, flood, drought, make people flee Winds can smash man’s plans to rubble
Or bring the life-sustaining rain – Wind never the same – blows again…
Andrew Wilson, 2024
A ship sailing in very light winds leaving the Doldrums from “Sailing Round Cape Horn” by Gunther t. Schultz – an artist’s record of the last days of commercial sailing ships. 1954 – London – Hodder & Stoughton
14 lines 4 tercets (3 line stanzas) ending with a rhyming couplet rhymes scheme is ABC, ABC, ABC, ABC, AA (or BB or CC or DD) in iambic pentameter of 10 syllables (5 feet) per line or iambic tetrameter of 8 syllables (4 feet) per line
