Grateful for the editors at Active Muse for publishing my poem, A Robot Brings Flowers. This poem began as a response to Rattle's Ekphrastic Challenge. Active Muse doesn't have the attribution, and the poem stands alone anyway, but it is an ekphrasis of Carla Paton's painting, Yellow Flowers.
Yellow Flowers shows a robot holding a bouquet of yellow flowers. The robot's face is expressive in a way that is at once hollow and mysterious and oddly vulnerable. He appears to be offering the flowers to the viewer.
My poem is a prose poem about the robot and his relationship to the person he is offering flowers to. I used AI to voice the robot because I wanted to get a robot's point of view from a robot. I was open about attributing the answer to my question, "What would a robot say when bringing flowers to a first date?" to ChatGPT. I know a lot of magazines prohibit AI in their guidelines, but I wanted my poem to be, in part, a commentary on our interaction with the technology--the ways we anthropomorphize it, the ways it mimics humanity. Still, at first I didn't know what to do with the flat, clichéd material AI gave me. Only when I started to think about all the ways the robot might fail in its quest for a first date, and what kind of person might feel sympathy for it did a prose poem response fall into place.
When Rattler didn't accept the poem, I don't think it was because of any strictures against my use of AI, which they do not absolutely prohibit. But even though they chose two other, very good, ekphrastic poems, I wanted mine to get out and about in the world, too. Many thanks to Poetry Editor Chaitali Gawada and Managing Editor Shashi Kadapa for seeing value in this meeting and blending of technology and humanity. Please go check out Active Muse, which has an eclectic and adventurous aesthetic.
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