I recently started writing poetry again. I find great joy and beauty in this art-form and its practice: for one, I can geek out on the vast linguistic puzzle, trying to find the proper words and expressions, the possible rhymes, the twists and turns that preserve a rhythm, the changes of pace, the multi-faceted metaphors and multi-layered meanings. I can sometimes torment myself with the unfinished, not yet perfected draft, until I finally feel complete.

Secondly, I tend to write about things and experiences that are meaningful to me, and in writing poetry, they reveal themselves to me again. I can see them in a new light and reprocess them. I can appraise new facets and derive new insights. I can even continue abandoned or neglected healing journeys through poetry.

Thirdly, I can share the poetry and find others who resonate. Or maybe I will never find them, but they still resonate. I may be able to express something that they also feel, but haven’t found the proper words to describe it themselves. Just as it happens to me when I delight in someone else’s beautiful words and expressions that I could never have found myself.

I recently composed what is perhaps the most personal and intimate poem I’ve ever written. I don’t know if I will ever share it here. But I did share it with the people who were there with me when the story happened. One of them responded beautifully, describing how she and her husband had goosebumps all over. She knew my experience, not just from being there with me, but also because she herself had been blessed with experiences of a similar kind:

“Thank you for letting us partake in your experience, which I know so well and could yet never put into such beautiful words.”

This brings tears of joy and tenderness to my eyes.

I feel blessed for the ability to touch others with my words. I want to use that gift, purely for the joy and beauty of it. I want to use it to describe my (our) actual lived experience. And I will never, never let AI write it for me, not even a single line. I’d rather spend an entire nerve-wrecking month on discovering the solution to a crucial passage than let an algorithm take me on a shortcut.

Also, I could never appreciate the deeply touching and transformative aspects of an experience without living through it myself. That includes its entire history and context – the moment when it occurs, the moments before, the days, weeks, months, years, lifetime(s), as well as all those countless human and more-than-human beings who have shaped its course. All of this is entirely based on direct lived experience. No algorithm could ever account for it. It might be able to fake the performance and convincingly pretend that it has experienced such things. But what is the value of it? Just because you probably couldn’t tell the difference, does that mean I should employ an algorithmic helper to write about something I have or haven’t experienced, even if I get away with it?

I’m trying to argue that such might be possible, but it would be utterly void of meaning. One reason for this is the fake performance itself, yet the other, perhaps deeper reason lies in foregoing the lived experience of the creative act itself. Pushing a button might produce a magnificent picture, and maybe someday I couldn’t tell the difference between this and a handcrafted one. But only the handcrafted one tells a story about being handcrafted. And this story contains all the experiential reasons for why a brushstroke has been placed here and not there, at this angle and not that, with these hues and not those.

So I want to write and share more poetry, but I also want to write and share how it came to be, what it stands for. I may share a poem that culminates in the momentary encounter with my inner child, filling me with sudden grief, deep appreciation, and profound relief. Without that frightened, strong, beautiful little boy within me, how could it have been even nearly the same?

And no algorithm could do this, even in a million years. It could produce the words, but there’s no “there” there. Nay, I want to hold up the beautiful mess of being human, even amidst all the heartbreak and horror, the violence and viciousness, the depression and despair that haunts us and makes us want to escape this bloody mess. Paraphasing many wise beings, the only way out is in and through! And the only wholeness is that which contains the whole.

Finally, let me borrow and transform Lord Byron’s famous lines from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage:

“There is a pleasure when the heart gives way,
There is a rapture in the days of yore,
When human lives would teem with art and play,
Ere all AIs, and despite pain galore:
I love not Androids less, but Mankind more,
From each experience, which we can share
From all we may be, or have been before,
To mingle with the Technosphere, and dare
What we can ne’er express, yet cannot help but care.”

Thank you for being human, dear reader, and for “humaning” together!