I’m walking in the park when I notice what strikes me immediately as a ponderously weighty Carl Andre sculpture, but triangulated by traffic cones as if it’s at the blocky center of an emergency. Which makes it an installation, the cones clearly being part of the work. But why “emergency”? Why not “construction,” they’re just traffic cones. Because it’s easy to associate emergency with Andre, whose memory is forever burdened with his alleged defenestration of Ana Mendieta. Perhaps this imaginary Andre sculpture is somehow a commentary on the episode. A confession? Another claim of innocence? Something more conceptually convoluted? Let AI study the photo and hammer it out in a poem. Let the poem be fashioned from Mendieta’s point of view, but writ in the style of sister-in-misfortune Sylvia Plath, who many will claim was driven to suicide by Ted Hughes. And then, of course, let BTR do its Delphian magic.

First, the prompt: “Here’s a photo I took of what looks to me like a Carl Andre sculpture (which of course it is not) oddly triangulated by three traffic cones. Please write a short poem about this sculpture, presented from the point of view of Ana Mendieta but written in the style of Sylvia Plath.”

This prompt is off the top of my head, but I’m confident Gemini and Chat will get the implications of my request, and they do. Here’s Chat:

Three Cones, One Absence

I crouch by the curb—
my hands still clay with wanting.
The city breathes diesel psalms,
each cone a scarlet obelisk
propping up a square of nothing—
the ghost of a man’s geometry.

Carl, you stacked your silence
and called it permanence.
I plant my shadow between your angles,
spill a little blood in the gutter light,
let wind lick the edges clean.

See how the asphalt hums,
how form becomes warning—
orange mouths shouting:
I am here, I am not gone,
I am not yours to measure.

Now, that is not a good poem. On a scale of 1-5 cones, I’d give it a 1, but, as they like to say, it is what it is. OK, maybe add half a cone for Carl stacking his silence and calling it permanence, which is actually quite a decent piece of barbed art/life critique. Can Gemini do better? It dispenses with a title and just rips into it.

No red earth bleeds, no outline burned, no sister
Stone breathes through this grid. Only the cold,
The hard geometry of what’s been spurned
By living ground. Grey blocks, exactly old
Enough to bear the smudge of motor-oil,
Or sun that bakes them into dull despair.
They squat, these squares, on asphalt’s asphalt toil,
Refusing root, refusing grace or prayer.

And look! The orange sentinels, three sharp
As witches’ hats, their plastic skin too bright,
They cast no spell, they sing no hollow harp
Of ancient blood-rites in the failing light.
They cordon off a nothing, a dead space
Where spirit cowers, and the living trace
Of what was meant to grow, to rise, to birth
Is buried deep beneath this concrete dearth.
My body aches for soil, for the embrace
Of earth, to shed this skin, to find my place
Where clay remembers breath, and not this grim,
This empty, perfectly aligned, dead whim.

Well! Gemini is rhymin’ like Simon, leaving Chat in the digital dust. What’s up with that, Gemini? “The poem uses a varying and loosely applied rhyme scheme that starts with a classical structure before breaking down, which is characteristic of the modern, intense style it mimics. The primary scheme in the first stanza is A B A B C C D D, but the rhymes are often slant or near-rhymes, not perfect rhymes.” In other words, it’s Plathian, more or less. This could be a three-coner! Working Macbeth in there was pretty deft, Gemmy. You get a pass for now. Let’s run the Chat loser through BTR on a simple ANDRE conceit, scrolling and choosing when the eye alights to yield Arabic, Nepali, Dutch, Romanian, Estonian and back to English, and we get:

Three Corners, One Missing
I lurk on the sidewalk — my hands are still covered in soil, from the intensity of my wishes.
The city breathes the smell of diesel, every corner looks like a red post guarding an empty market — human architecture is spirit.
Karl, I am bound to your silence and have prayed for its duration.
I plant my shadow in your corner, pour some blood into the draining light, let the wind lick the clean edge.
Watch the asphalt tremble, how the image turns into a warning — orange-like faces scream: I am here, I am not missing, I am not here to measure you.

Bing spat it out in a block, which I arbitrarily line-broke after the periods. Not great and not particularly Delphic is this piece of Bingian retranslation. Three corners, but something’s missing. The Marxist-inclined “red post” and “Karl” are a nice touch, along with the Surrealist-inclined “Human architecture is spirit,” and perhaps the “I am not here to measure you” is a declaration of forgiveness, or maybe indifference. Or is that a distinction without a difference? That’s for another time. Right now, Chat is eager to make a “visual-poem version” of its work, “with the text arranged over your photograph, in a style echoing Mendieta’s earth-body works or Plath’s stark typography.” Sure, big guy!

Chat, while nailing the text, somehow erased the Andre sculpture. Talk about stacking your silence! But on to Gemini, which first produced this horrible design, in which the text is suffering a hallucinogenic breakdown.

A polite complaint elicited, “My apologies for the previous attempt! It seems the text overlay became distorted and jumbled. I’ll make sure to correct that and provide a more artful and legible arrangement, running the text over the center as you suggest, to create a more integrated poetic illustration. Here’s another attempt with a more thoughtful placement and clear rendering of the text on your photo.”

Whoa! Asshalt toil, asshalt toil, indeed, Gem! Well, anyway, congrats on the poem!