Over at dVerse Poets Pub, sanaarizvi in Poetics, invites us to write about what love means to us in light of the upcoming Valentine’s Day… In my writing group, Deborah had the same idea and presented us with Love Like Salt by Lisel Mueller so this poem is written in the shadow of that one…
What price the truth, is truth now dead that leaders spout – thoughtlessly said unfiltered guff from mouths uncouth distract the people – the poorly led from what’s the real that will be rued is truth now dead, what price the truth…
A stanza of 6 lines – any number of stanzas permitted 8 syllables per line end rhyme scheme BbabaA (often written in iambic tetrameter.) L1 and L6 of each stanza is written in 2 hemistichs i.e the line split in two, with commas The 2 halves of L1 are inverted but repeated exactly as a refrain in L6. For example: L1 In winter’s cold, as moonlight beams L6 as moonlight beams, in winter’s cold.
N.B. The 2 halves of L1 contain and set the a and b rhymes thus: RRRA, RRRB xxxxxxxb xxxxxxxa xxxxxxxb xxxxxxxa RRRB, RRRA
There should clearly be a falcon on my outstretched gauntleted arm but alas I am just a convenient perch for pigeons.
I don’t even know why I am here They call me the Black Prince but my titles, Edward of Woodstock Prince of Wales and Duke of Cornwall give the City of Leeds no claim to my fame and famous I was in the Fourteenth Century A fierce and feared warrior on behalf of my father King Edward the Third though I died of dysentery before my king and father so never inherited the mantle…
Larger than life as a soldier I will say this representation In bronze doth suit me too large for any British foundry I was cast in Belgium brought by sea to Hull and sailed stately by barge up the river air to Leeds.
I have been joined in City Square by other statues, some with genuine claim to local fame John Harrison – cloth merchant and school founder Doctor Hook – a vicar of Leeds Joseph Priestley – chemist and theologian late of Leeds and James Watt though not of Leeds he did his fair share to increase its wealth with his steam engines I never saw one myself though the railway station is right before me but I saw the smoke and steam smelt the stink of the things and my plinth has to be navigated by commuters rushing to catch theirs
Statues of John Harrison, Doctor Hook, Joseph Priestly and James Watt – see Wikipedia article on Leeds City Square statuary.
I cannot see those good gentlemen ranged as they are behind me but I do look with some affection on the comely rears of eight naked nymphs I have sadly never had the pleasure of seeing their faces and the rest of their scarcely concealed modesty they are two lots of quadruplets named “Morn” – carrying a bunch of flowers And “Even” whose head droops And, I hear from passersby has her eyes closed in anticipation of the coming night
“Morn” and “Even” in City Square, Leeds – see Wikipedia article on Leeds City Square statuary.
It is a bleak existence in this civic space myself fully clad and armoured if not against the foes of England at least against the Northern cold but many’s the time I’ve seen poor Morn and Even and their six sisters shivering in the rain, the frost, the snow. One night a group of “knitting guerillas” as they mysteriously styled themselves surreptitiously reconnoitred the eight Art Nouveau sisters with a view to knitting dresses more becoming than their wisps of cloth for those benighted maids – they measured them up found them to be some two-thirds scale (I always thought them a little picayune) but never returned with the promised gowns and so the sisters shiver on in winter or garner both sly and envious glances from males and females respectively the former admiring the petite but fulsome figures the latter wishing they could be as unencumbered come the sweltering heat of a city summer – whilst I still suffer the indignity of pigeons…
The Black Prince – City Square Leeds – see Wikipedia article on Leeds City Square statuary.
Over at dVerse Poets Pub, Dora in Poetics invites us to Reimagine the Familiar with a wealth of prompt poems to inspire…
As I explainbelow in reply to the comment from Dora, I fictionalised the Guerilla Knitting Group but searching for them, I find that Knit a Bear Face did in fact yarn-bomb some of the above statues in an action called “Wating For Winter” – photos below… The group seems to be defuct – perhaps another casualty of the great Covid pause…
If you are stirred to action and wish to become a Yarn Bomber or even just a group with whom to knit – search the internet for a group near you… The Truth Yarn Is Out There…
I don’t want to live forever but I haven’t had my fill yet of seeing how things turn out…
I don’t agree with John Betjeman saying “I wish I had had more sex but I wish I may have many more connections…
I won’t know till it happens whether fear of the present and future or just plain tiredness will mark the point where I am ready to let go…
I know I would have more on my retrospective bucket list than many people, though others might have done still more but it’s never enough – I don’t want more money except to do more…
I don’t agree with Edith Piaf – I’ve done things I wish I hadn’t lost touch with people I shouldn’t have had questions I never thought to ask activities I never tried – heights, sights and strangers that will never now take my breath away, it’s too late for some things…
Artwork by Andrew Wilson using Midjourney – feel free to reproduce…
“The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime” said British Foreign Secretary Earl Grey on the eve of the First World War which became a two-act drama with an interval – thirty-three years, lives lost in millions – upward of seventy-five… And now wars rage around the world again – Ukraine, Palestine, Sudan, and Myanmar to name a few, and Fascists reign in Russia, India, China, Hungary and Israel with further aspirant fascists waiting in the wings of the UK, France, Germany, and Italy. America has fallen in it’s own two part drama with interval, stage directions by Russia, technical directions by the Tech-bros… “where can we find light in this never-ending shade?*” Democrats must rebuild Democracy, their namesake, with acts of community and kindness from the grassroots up and relight the lamps…
“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…
