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writing+art
unfurl /7 image by Ryota Hisanabe.
Tag: Les Wicks
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An artificial intelligence poetry review
Les Wicks’ Time Taken
Artificial intelligence is increasingly being used in creative fields, including literary analysis. Here is a review of Les Wicks’ Time Taken, a new and selected book of poems published in 2025. The review is written and presented in the form of a podcast by artificial intelligence hosts.
I intentionally left the review unedited; my only intervention was to customize the tone to be adopted by the fictional hosts and to require them to quote extensively from the actual poems.
This experiment is published with permission of Les Wicks. This AI review contains several significant errors. Quotations are sometimes wrong, interpretations sometimes wrong, and the dialogue is annoyingly repetitive; but what do we expect? It’s made by a computer algorithm.
The process yields a linguistic analysis of a text’s themes, based simply on the words and phrases used in it. I’ve included some of this analysis in the notes to the video.
—Stephen J. Williams
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Les Wicks
Me—what can I say? Poetry has been a core part of my life since I was about 19 with a largish gap in the middle pursuing career and family. At its best, poetry can say things unutterable anywhere else and I’m completely committed to it. I really am now a one trick pony even if the beast is as thin as poetry is. I edit and run workshops which provides a bit of income but is much more rewarding on deeper levels. Most of my publishing work is aimed at getting new audiences rather than “clogging up” pre-existing outlets. Varying approaches, but some extraordinary outcomes in terms of getting poetry in front of people who wouldn’t normally encounter it. As for my own work I feel blessed that I have seen publication in rather a lot of places/countries/languages.
I constantly work at bettering my poetry, I don’t share (a surprisingly common) delusion that I am a (grossly unrecognised) International Treasure. Compared to say actors I have occasionally said I am not a Streep or de Niro, but I aspire to be maybe Brian Dennehy. But heard today he has died!
Les Wicks, 2020.unfurl posts
- unfurl /7
- An artificial intelligence poetry review
- Les Wicks Launches Ellen Shelley’s ‘Out of the Blocks’
- unfurl /3
- Les Wicks
‘Time Taken’ by Les Wicks.
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