Samuel Rafael Barber

Poetry Machine

PUBLISHED IN FOLIO 2025: VOL. 40.

No one can be sure of when, exactly, the man with the machine was first spotted on his favored park bench (or the circumstances of his arrival, for that matter) because no one can remember. In those days the sun rose and the sun set. The sun set and the sun rose. One day we knew nothing about the man or his machine. The next, there he sat on his favored park bench. That’s just how the story goes.

He preferred a park bench on the periphery of the chess players. As they hustled for lunch money, talking shit and bellyaching, he would sit on the furthest extreme of the scene and observe. Tourists would walk down and up the sidewalk, or up and down the sidewalk, depending on whether they were staying downtown or uptown, whether they were coming or going. Tourists would snap photos of the chess players, of the sole survivor of the latest wave of Dutch elm disease, of the dirtied fountain they so often mistook for the dirtied fountain crucial to a particularly popular (particularly white) sitcom’s opening credits from two decades before.

The poetry machine did not betray its function. Not yet. Not then. The cube’s dimensions measured approximately one foot, and an incision the width of a paperback book and the height of a credit card could be seen on one of its faces. Otherwise nondescript, the poetry machine would sit on the bench beside the man who brought it to our attention. This is beyond dispute. Some contend that it was also observing the chess players, the tourists, and our inability to cope with the all-encompassing chaos which subsumes us in order to refine its algorithm. Others insist that this is simply not how programming works. The machine had no eyes (not yet, not then) as far as anyone could tell. And yet we were recognized, each and every one of us. Seen for perhaps the first, and certainly final, time. The machine had no ears, either. And yet the man would whisper to the machine throughout these days. Perhaps this is why some recall the man and his machine even before he began selling its poetry for a buck or two. Even in this city of the mad, the man and the machine stood out.

It was not uncommon, in those days, to find a starving poet in some decaying metropolis sitting on this or that park bench with a notebook and pen, selling their creativity for a few minutes, a few stanzas. Poets could publish their work in literary journals, sure, but these publications rarely paid. Poets could collect their poems into a single manuscript and submit this manuscript to a competition conducted by a university press, sure, but even the winning efforts rarely paid for the inputted labor (the poets compensated with an honorarium’s gesture). 

The realities of the professionalization of libraries––an invention of the 20th century research institution––ensured that the costs of bundled electronic journal subscriptions consumed about seventy percent of funds allocated to library collections. Since poets relied upon academic presses to survive, and since academic presses relied upon library collections to survive, well . . . you see the tension. Whereas the first (and often only) printings of such poetic works had been about 1200 copies not so long before, in the era of the man and the machine, the average printing was closer to 350 copies. Fewer books of poetry sold and so less poetry was read. Fewer books of poetry were published at all.

The poetry machine’s first poem was purchased for one dollar by Stephanie Kirk of Des Moines, Iowa. Stephanie Kirk was visiting her daughter Ruby Kirk, an undergraduate at a private university with an annual tuition exceeding fifty-thousand dollars. Hot and tired, waiting for her daughter’s impending arrival so that they might attend some long-forgotten musical involving a petulant (and slaveholding) authoritarian whitewashed as a rapping abolitionist, she sought shade under the park’s last elm tree.

Stephanie Kirk claims that the man then asked her, “Hey Miss, would you like a poem? A poem constructed with your specific existence in mind, but which nonetheless speaks to the entire human species, such is the universality of its message, of its understanding of the human condition?” Stephanie Kirk was too well mannered to turn down the offer. Besides, she thought her daughter might like to tape the poem to her dorm room’s wall as a sort of memento. She expected the man to tear out a page of his notebook and begin scribbling. The machine spat out a strip of paper instead (followed seconds later by the corresponding bill of sale) ejected into the poet’s clutches. A transactional relationship to be sure, but one understood as such, at least, in comparison to the real cost of the exchange.

The poetry machine’s first poem is hung, to this day, in the Museum of Modern Art. The Starry Night had once commanded the best of all of MOMA’s many walls, but it has since been relegated to the second best of MOMA’s many walls. Men and women and boys and girls had once huddled into a knotted mass to stare at The Starry Night. Now they huddle to stare at the poetry machine’s first poem. With the help of binoculars, even those in the back approvingly nod, monologue about Dickinson or perhaps Breton.

If you haven’t been to MOMA, if you don’t live in the greatest city in the world, don’t despair. You’ve seen the poem in a petrochemical commercial from the world’s second largest company by revenue celebrating International Women’s Day. Heard it in a co-worker’s voice on a Monday morning. Touched it in all the right places, several times, with different sexual partners. Believed in it all your life.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. 

It did not take long for the poetry machine to become a local sensation. Tourists were amazed by the quickness of composition and quality of verse. It spat out poem after poem without delay, each poem touching its subject in some deep, meaningful way. Each poem causing its subject to reexamine the life they led. More than a few divorces were initiated for this reason, more than a few relationships and marriages consummated, too. More than a few men and women and boys and girls decided to change their lives in the aftermath of reading their poem. More than a few followed through. Some retired. Others went back to work. Some went to therapy. Others quit therapy.

Tourists were intrigued as to how the poetry machine approached personalization, exactly, since the machine received no input. There were no buttons to push, no secret levers to discover. No matter the number of poems sold on a given day, the man was never seen loading the machine with paper, and yet it never seemed to require refilling. The man did not whisper to the machine anymore, now that they were gathering a daily crowd which dwarfed the herd who snapped photos of the sculptural representation of the stock exchange’s one second attention span. A flock which approached the size of the mob transfixed by the enormous rectangular billboards comprising the city’s square monument, a space which, to be sure, represents the timeless idolatry of emotional manipulation.

The paper of record took a break from admonishing millennials over the latest campus protest of a neo-Nazi speaker in order to register these developments. Even the former chief book critic of this newspaper took to its pages to pen an extended rumination on the disjuncture between man and machine and accuse the poetry machine of gross incompetence. She wasn’t opposed to automated writing. Not in principle at least, she wrote in this column. But it takes a human to know a human, she wrote. What it means to be human cannot be known without being felt, cannot be expressed without being suffered. 

The former chief book critic for the paper of record published an extended retraction in the subsequent issue, having visited the park herself, having received her own poem. A poem meant just for her. A poem which resonated beyond her personage. She refused, of course, to reveal the contents of this poem. Themes, neither. But she used only the most strident language to dismiss those who repudiated the genius of the poetry machine. It understood her better than she understood herself, she admitted. It understood poetry better than she understood poetry, she admitted to only herself.

The man had made quite a few dollars by then, and you could tell from the change in his attire. Whereas he had formerly worn only the most ill-fitting fraying corduroy jacket and inadvertently hole-ridden jeans, he now wore an expertly tailored corduroy jacket and jeans whose every hole had been focus tested. Of course, the focus testing concentrated on preparing public relations strategies for a presumably angry populace, once incriminating details were leaked to ProPublica or it was time to reveal the master plan in a stockholder meeting (whichever came first). Whereas he had formerly fretted that their scheme was too conspicuous (that it would never work), the man now slept so very well indeed. But for this one detail, the man and his machine followed the same routine day after day, week after week. 

Year after year passed in this way. Fewer and fewer books of poetry continued to sell, though the poetry machine created verse after verse, poem after poem. 

No one can be sure of when, exactly, the man with the machine was first contacted by Google, which had been churning out increasingly elaborate doodles day after day, year after year. The hope was, of course, that its encroachment into bedrooms and its firing of employees seeking to unionize might be obfuscated by pandering testaments to notable humans from years past with some connection to the calendar date on which you, user of Google’s search engine, open up Google’s Chrome browser and begin your day in earnest. 

While Google, by then, had already received 54.7 billion dollars in annual digital advertising revenue (a trifling sum in comparison to their market power now) and controlled 44% of the entire online market––their duopoly with Facebook had already eviscerated both local and national journalism and print media in those halcyon days––their efforts to win hearts and minds required further investment. Brett Hume, age 34, of Dallas, Texas, had an idea.

For some time, Google had been running out of ways to appropriate significant cultural icons for the sake of engendering goodwill through public relations. In large part because it was the rare job in which he could wear a hoodie and beanie to a workplace filled with peers who valued things like innovation and rationality and the marketplace of ideas above all else, Brett Hume joined Google’s Calico division (founded to “cure death” in 2013) soon after its creation. In large part because he was the only employee in the entire division who doodled during meetings in order to concentrate (and because viable cost cutting ideas were rewarded with handsome bonuses), Brett Hume proposed that Google lay off its team of doodle creatives and purchase a peculiar little machine he’d been hearing so much about. Instead, Google would post a single poem per day just below the search bar. Each day’s poem would utilize consumer metadata to pursue a degree of personalization of which the poetry machine was then simply incapable. No two poems intended for disparate individuals on the same day would be alike, nor would the poems created on consecutive days for a single person contain any trace of repetition or similarity. With a 90.46% search engine global market share and an estimated 5 billion daily searches performed by an estimated 1.43 billion daily users, the poetry machine would usher in a golden era of public engagement with poetry. In siphoning consumers from Bing or Yahoo or DuckDuckGo, Brett Hume calculated that the transaction would pay for itself within the week. He calculated that, together, Google and the poetry machine would save poetry by disrupting poetry.

The cost amounted to a rounding error’s rounding error. Google announced 160 billion dollars in total annual revenue in the days before the arrangement.

The deal proved more lucrative for the man than his obscure iPhone game, or the app which allowed users to superimpose a certain apricot-shaded president’s 60,000-dollar microcylinder mane on their own photos. Then again, scraping three billion images from Facebook, Youtube, Venmo, and millions of other websites was no trivial feat. Neither was creating the neural net which allows users to match photos taken from their mobile phones to all public photos of that person, with corresponding links to where the photos lived in the cloud. 

We know this. Some facts, some figures. Google is (or, was) a publicly traded company after all, obligated (for a time) to disclose financial data to shareholders. But so many of the principal agents in this destruction remain unknown. We are not attempting to be sly, nor are we withholding. One cannot simply google these stakeholders, for obvious reasons. That was that, or at least this would be that, were the context a part of the myth, a part of the legend. We cannot forget what we do not know.

These days the sun rises and the sun sets. The sun sets and the sun rises. Each day brings a new poem for the same man or woman or boy or girl. Books of poetry are no longer sold at all. Still, it is not uncommon, these days at least, to find a starving poet in some decaying metropolis sitting on this or that park bench with a notebook and pen, reflecting upon life and death and everything in between.

Samuel Rafael Barber is 0.0000000122226% of the population, a Chicano from South Texas, and the author of the chapbook Thousands of Shredded Scraps of Paper Located across Five Landfills, That if Pierced Together Form a Message (The Cupboard, 2019). His work has appeared in DIAGRAM, Normal School, Passages North, Puerto del Sol, Quarterly West, Southwest Review, and elsewhere. He holds a PhD in English and Literary Arts from the University of Denver and an MFA from the University of Arizona.