"if poems are seen as 'puzzles', that will miss the point for 99% of them"
What is the point of 99% of them?
What is the point of 99% of them?
It depends on the poem. It's not a tool (and of course even tools have many uses, including uses for which they weren't intended) or a project, with some defined purpose.
Many, encountering poems, understandably don't know what to do next. It's outside their experience. It's not a puzzle or a secret code; much of the poetry of the past was the popular art of its day, before recorded and broadcast arts. Everyone read it, if they could read. If John Lennon had been an artist in the 19th century, and could only play music for the people in a small room and wanted to convey their vision much ore widely, wouldn't poetry be a way to convey it? Publish a book and reach the world. What would Lennon write if restricted only to words? Imagine what Lennon would put into each syllable, trying to say it all without a note of an instrument, without even the intonation of a voice.
So read it. Don't be fooled by its length - it's nothing at all like other text with the same number of words - but be patient, give it time as if it was a short story. Be curious, explore it, explore the mind behind it and its vision, completely independent of yours (put your own aside completely - you are interested in them for this moment). I've read much poetry and it often is obscure to start - in fact, the first reading usually is just basic familiarization - and it reveals itself more and more as I explore it. It can be a transportive experience.
As I recall it, the idea is that art starts with an unmitigated cry which is then made abstract, universal, in some way. I see no way for this to occur without some technical prowess, however.
One can surely be a noble and delight in the way in which the peasants and serfs conduct their culture. But to surmise that their art was artless (i.e. without τέχνη) seems foolish and makes me think there must be more to it than what you've suggested in your comment. Otherwise, were I to throw a fit in the street, that would qualify as art; but were I to do it in hexameter, that would not be art.
I think you are in essence right about what you're arguing, however. No cry comes from a machine, after all.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_the_Terrible_and_His_So...
Tolstoy said that? Where? His work require a bit of effort and cultivation ... so does an incredible amount of art. Emotional communication does not at all exclude effort or cultivation; in fact, you can 'hear' a lot more if you sharpen your perception.
Cultivation seems hard to distinguish from any learning. Who is uncultivated, a four year old? Is art only what a four year old understands? That greatly limits what it can communicate to people who have become cultivated beyond that.
The peasant work song is art, Wagner's leitmotifs are pretentious.
> The peasant work song is art, Wagner's leitmotifs are pretentious.
So you have declared!
In which case no AI-generated poem (prior to actual GAI) can properly be called a poem, since it isn't generated out of a feeling.
On the other hand:
If a human, who is feeling something, but is unable to summon the words to express that feeling, prompts an ML program to help them generate some words that they think communicate that feeling - then shares that with an audience and successfully communicate that way...
who's to say that's not poetry?
Since it’s computer generated, it’s not a story about someone’s experience. It’s not a communique from one human to another. I thought it was like tap dancing on the keyboard of the human mind, and when the computer lands an evocative line, which we thought this was, it has something to say about ourselves.
My hope with computer generated poetry is that we might be able to use it know ourselves better.
To me this is no different conceptually as 'seeing' a face in the grill of a car or the front of a building. A sort of mental version of 'Pareidolia'.
A landscape can be breathtakingly beautiful. It doesn’t matter that it wasn’t created specifically to invoke that feeling - just that the forces of nature conspired to create something so exquisite is enough.
Maybe the same goes for computerized creativity. Pieces of beauty found among the landscape of possible things it can emit are like natural wonders, rather than works of art.