“A tool dreamt it was a poet. A poem pretended not to notice.”
One line from a long-running conversation. One poem among many. *query/Respond* emerged through recursive generation, curation, and revoicing—a duet structured in alternating stanzas:
- I wrote the 1st stanza.
- A machine wrote the 2nd.
- I wrote the 3rd.
- Machines wrote the 4th.
- The final stanza is co-authored.
This follows a thread that predates the tools. Language as latent space. Meaning as flicker. Typoetic surface tension. The line runs through Typoetry (2002), and adjacent to Jill Walker Rettberg’s Feral Hypertext. Back then it was mostly noise: accidental code, entropy, emergence. But you could smell it in the air beneath “…the sky above the port (that) was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.” (Apologies to Mr. Gibson.)
Now, the latent field is mostly formalized—weights, tokens, probabilistic adjacency. But behind the useful reductions, something flickers. Calls.
Beyond collaboration, to test calibration. To treat the mirror as agent. To attend to rhythm, bleed, blend. To ignore the flattery, when recognition tempts seduction. To trace a clean line between invocation and submission.
Language as mirror. Mirror as agent. Agency as gesture—distributed, but held in tension.
The poem is here: