So I’ve been single-mindedly writing my fantasy series—and not producing posts for Poemshape. I’ve reached my word goal for my fifth novel and odds are good that I might finish it by the end of the month; then I’ll have one more novel to write, hopefully done by Christmas. And I couldn’t be happier with the over-arching story. Really a beautiful story.
In the meantime, I discovered the poet and book at right. The Collected Poems of Robert P. Tristram Coffin. I had never heard of him, but according to Wikipedia he won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1936, which is to say, he was a big deal in his own day. He was apparently friends with Robert Frost and co-founded with Carroll Towle the Writers’ Conference of the University of New Hampshire in 1956. This was modeled after Breadloaf, in Vermont. How fleeting is fame! I never miss an opportunity to visit the poetry section in any used bookstore, and in all that time I’ve never once run across Coffin’s poems. And I’m sure the same fate awaits the vast majority of poets since coffin. The Wikipedia article doesn’t mention Coffin ever being named Poet Laureate, which is surprising given that he won a Pulitzer; and that’s probably because the favored verse form had definitively swung to free verse by that point. Free verse was the new and shiny bauble, while Coffin was clearly following in the footsteps of EA Robinson and Robert Frost. (Incidentally, I discovered that the book is autographed by the poet! From what I can gather, that makes it worth about 15 dollars.)
So what kind of poems did Coffin write? Unlike Frost, he wasn’t quite so given over to the darkness in ourselves and nature. His temperament tended toward the congenial, which meant Coffin was more apt to end a poem cheerfully (and that makes his poetry feel somewhat superficial). An example would be the The Lost Graveyard (graveyards being a staple of Coffin and Victorian poetry).
The forest has won. And yet the trees
For all they won, are not at ease;
The wild roots know, somehow, a bone
Is not the same things as a stone.
Surprised to find that things so hated
Could lie so still and cold and sated,
The green things stand in awe and wonder
And what their roots have buried under.
Birds know this place of darkling quiet,
And they had rather not come nigh it…
The first 6 lines are such lines as a great poet might have written, easily worthy of Frost, but Coffin exercises poor artistic judgment when he chooses to rhyme “under” with “wonder”. My bet is that “roots have buried under” occurred to Coffin first. So what rhymes with ‘under’?—wonder. That was a mistake; but he’s going to try to make it work. He comes up with the out of place and banal “awe and wonder”. These are sentiments that don’t belong here. It’s a mistake Frost would not have made. Invoking “awe and wonder” in “green things” that just a moment ago were expressing hatred for the bone, completely undercuts any sense of unity in theme or feeling. If it were my own poem, I would have gone with ‘plunder’:
Surprised to find that things so hated
Could lie so still and cold and sated—
A stale and desiccated plunder
For thirsty roots to reach through and under.
Birds know this place and fear it,
And they had rather not go near it…
I’m also more willing to break the meter. “Darkling quiet” strikes me as a retreat from the mood created by the preceding quatrains. It’s a cutesy and facile word (he has a weakness for the cutesy and facile) more appropriate to light verse—a sort of Victorian sensibility that is dutifully cheerful (but some or most readers may prefer this in Coffin). At any rate, it’s this instinct to retreat into what flirts with—sometimes descends into—superficiality that likely prevents Coffin from being read or remembered today. Readers still look for comfort in poetry. Just look at the instapoets who’ve turned themselves into pharmacists writing medicinal poems so small you can swallow them with warm milk. But lasting poetry is lasting because it doesn’t try to fix us. It reminds us that we’re not alone.
Coffin will end his graveyard poem with an utterly banal sentiment, as if he’d prefer to wave away that momentary vision of terror.
It seems as if this were a snare
A spider wove across the air
Which has caught a bee so bright
The spider hides away in fright.
The spider (the horror and terror of the buried) hides away in fright. Compare that to the spider in Frost’s poem:
I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,
On a white heal-all, holding up a moth
Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth–
Assorted characters of death and blight
Mixed ready to begin the morning right,
Like the ingredients of a witches’ broth–
A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth,
And dead wings carried like a paper kite.
What had that flower to do with being white,
The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?
What brought the kindred spider to that height,
Then steered the white moth thither in the night?
What but design of darkness to appall?–
If design govern in a thing so small.
There will be no waving away of Frost’s horror. Coffin is content to remain a congenial poet, skilled in rhyme, meter and form. He also possesses a gift for imagery which, if you’re a reader looking for an alternative to the uninspired verse and imagery of contemporary poetry, might be a welcome alternative. And there’s a reason Coffin won the Pulitzer. Every so often his congenial nature, subject matter and poetic talents combine to create poems that are truly beautiful.
The Older Love
There remains an older love below
The roots of trees than any love I know
This day and tomorrow. There will be
The love that holds the thunder and the sea
In the hollow of its palm and charts
The voyage of death through mayflies’ emerald hearts
Forever and forever. He who sings
Must learn his love songs from the cosmic things.
I shall leave the music of my pain
And learn the ancient rhythms of the grain,
Of hunger looking out at daisies’ eyes,
Quiet hymns of fish and fireflies,
Which have a rapture in them past desire
And sadness elemental as the fire.
I shall learn of birds how there are wings
Folded in me as in the cosmic things.
AI Literary Scandals Are The Best
The latest literary scandal concerns the publication of a story, The Serpent in the Grove, published in Granta and clearly written by AI. What makes the scandal pure gold is that while the author has taken heat, it’s the award givers who are getting sliced, diced and served. For someone like me, who has less than little faith in the self-appointed arbiters of modern literature, this is —very gratifying. There’s now speculation that the judges themselves used AI to filter the stories and to write their own comments. Probably not?—but chestnuts like: “precise yet richly evocative”, “pulses with a voice of restraint and quiet authority”, “a beautifully told and assured piece of storytelling”, “a melodic voice that lingers” is such a grab bag of stock words and phrases that one wonders if the reviewers just couldn’t be bothered. But it’s exactly the sort of rote and formulaic write up one would expect from AI.
Which brings me to Brittany Allen’s comment, of the Literary Hub, who states that “it’s also just true that AI writing is getting harder to detect with the naked human eye”. Is it though? Any number of readers seemed able to readily identify it. The most trenchant criticism of the award committee (to which I’ve lost the link), argued that the award committee’s choice is exactly what one would expect given that AI is arguably trained on the very MFA literature that they and their generation have helped to define. In other words, AI was flattering them with their own literary standards. Little wonder then, that they gave the story the award. What I find especially damning is the award committee’s defense: that is, every author assured them they weren’t using AI. Setting aside the eye-rolling naïvety, the defense is an attempt to evade the obvious criticism that they, the judges, should be able to recognize AI generated fiction. Why else are they judges? Isn’t that their job? Shouldn’t they be able to discriminate between award-winning literature and AI slop? If they can’t, then maybe they aren’t the right people for the job.
I have also been amused by the many criticisms of the inappropriate and convoluted metaphors used by AI (with which The Serpent in the Grove is stuffed) when there are any number of lauded contemporary poets whose poetry is full of such nonsensical imagery.
“Sun on galvanise is a cruel instrument. It beats until the roof talks back in a dry moan. The day the grove began to remember, the roof over Vishnu Mohammed’s shack groaned like a drumskin too tight for the heat. Inside, air clung thick as porridge skin: damp earth, woodsmoke, and the sour tang of fermenting cocoa. A soot-blackened lamp hung from a nail. No fan, no bulb, no hum — only the thin light slipping between warped boards and the breath of hills holding their heat like a secret.”
Apparently contemporary poets are held to a different standard.
Lastly, and tangentially related, I was amused by Richard Dawkin’s declaration that AI is conscious even if it doesn’t know it. Dawkins is a hard atheist and reductionist. He doesn’t believe in free will, calling it an illusion, and hews to a materialist and determinist model of the universe. To him, our consciousness is a product of physical processes and nothing more. But this theory of consciousness puts individuals like Dawkins in a curious bind as regards AI. To them, it makes perfect sense that AI could become conscious (since consciousness is little more than the sum total of our neurons). If that’s the case though, then Dawkins’s only means of discerning sentience in machines is by their output. But consciousness isn’t what we perceive in others; it’s what we experience within ourselves. That’s not something the methodology of science has an ability to address, and so scientists like Dawkins are forced to discount that inward experience while foolishly ascribing sentience/consciousness to algorithms that are specifically programmed to produce what Dawkins is looking for—
An awful lot like what an AI chatbot might produce if it were prompted to create an award winning story for a committee of contemporary writers.
Just saying.
by me | June 17 2026
