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.
I like Tolstoy's conclusion in What is Art?, which I'm doing an injustice by summarizing as "universal emotional communication" which is contrasted with paid work, technical prowess, esoteric work, formulaic-derivative or pure aesthetics - anything that requires effort and "cultivation" to understand is not art.
> anything that requires effort and "cultivation" to understand is not art.
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.
My interpretation of what he intended more closely aligns with the word "pretentious". Artistic contributions that are veiled behind complexity and technique, or require explanation and close examination, and exposure. I can't speak to the native Russian texts, but the English translations of his work, I would surmise, could be understood by anyone. In the preface to the copy of What is Art? that I read, it was reported that Tolstoy struggled with the topic for some time, and that he struggled to adhere to the principals he laid that define art. But again, I'm butchering it, and suggest you read it for yourself.
The peasant work song is art, Wagner's leitmotifs are pretentious.
I've never seen Tolstoy's attempt at a such definition before, but from what you describe, it reminds me of what Joyce had Stephen Daedalus think about art (I wonder if it was informed at all by Tolstoy).
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.
It's not so much that art had ought to be without prowess, but that the predominating reason for art to exist is as a medium of communication of a message, of emotion, to everyone. Art for art's sake, art designed only to convey the technical abilities of an artist isn't art because it isn't communicating the frame of reference of an artist, it's showing their ability to cleanly transition from dark to light values. It isn't intended to convey the mournful sadness and doesn't impute the viewer with the sense of voyeurism a la Repin's Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan on 16 November 1581 but as I qualified in the parent, I'm doing the text an injustice, it's a great work.
One definition is that a poem is a mechanism for communicating a feeling from inside one human's mind into another's.
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...
I was hanging out with a girl who worked to verify the authenticity of social media profiles. She saw a number of computer generated profiles. One that stuck with her had a line, “Every year I look for a raise, but it never comes.”
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.
That’s a very good point. If a computer program can generate words that make you feel something, does it even matter that there was no intent behind the program that selected those words?
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.
> 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.
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'.
What is the point of 99% of them?