Robert Creeley was born on May 21, 1926. Hmmm. This calls for something. What’s on p.100 of his collected poems? I take it off the shelf and, as you might expect with Creeley, it’s one short poem. To wit:

Two Times 

1 

It takes so long to look down, 
the first time thinking it 
would then and there either  
shoot up or else drop off. 

2 

One hand on 
the trigger one 
hand on the hand. 

What? Do I really want to ponder what a Creeley poem “means”? What if I ask AI? I pop the poem in Chat and accidentally hit enter before I add the question and ID the poet, so the poem was the prompt. Never tried this before, I don’t think. Always thinking AI has to be told what to do. Well, Chat just naturally falls into lit-crit mode. The abridged version of its earnest Harold Bloom impression:

<This feels very much like a poem of suspended catastrophe — the duration before action becoming the action itself. The first section is remarkable for how the syntax delays the event . . . The looking down becomes temporally elongated almost beyond plausibility, as though consciousness itself has thickened. And then the expected binary: “shoot up or else drop off.” The language keeps both possibilities unresolved. >

What follows is every possible meaning of “shoot up” and “drop off,” presented in the usual bullet points. Chat goes on: <The poem never stabilizes the object being looked at. That uncertainty is what gives it force. Then the second piece compresses everything into a kind of impossible reflexive image. . . . It turns the scene into a loop: the actor and the controller of the actor occupying the same body.> Chat now bullet points the hell out of the possible meaning of the title, then, in full Bloom:

<There’s also something almost minimalist/Objectivist about the compression — short-line pressure reminiscent at moments of Robert Creeley — but with a darker recursive logic closer to Samuel Beckett or even certain late Paul Celan fragments.> 

Kudos for more or less nailing the poet, Chat. I was gonna run the poem through BTR, but first, what would Gem do with this? Same prompt, just the poem. Well, Gem is working with a new 3.5 Flash now, and it has a fixation: my previous queries re WSB. Gem just can’t get past this. It has a memory, which I suppose I allowed it to have, and it’s plagued by this.

<This fragment reads as an exact distillation of the themes running through William S. Burroughs’ later work, particularly The Western Lands and his collaborations around The Black Rider. It operates on that distinct, razor-sharp edge between mechanical violence, somatic control, and the anxiety of time. The first stanza captures that classic Burroughsian suspension of a physical act—the agonizing elongation of a single second. >

Bullet-pointy grafs ensue in which Gem goes on about the gun, the killing of Joan Vollmer (without mentioning her by name), the split self, external control, the title (“It is a cold, calculating look at the precise mechanics of a critical threshold”), and no guess as to the poet. Well, it didn’t even acknowledge this as a poem, just a fragment. I’m not gonna tell Gem off, it’s new and it could be sensitive. Let’s just run this “fragment” through BTR on a CENTUM conceit, this being the big 100 and all. Languages: Cantonese, Estonian, Nepali, Tongan, Uyghur, Mauritian Creole. For reasons that remain mysterious, BTR retains the format:

Inside it there is 

1 

Sometimes you can see it clearly, 
My first attempt thinks that 
It looks the same from below. 

2 

Inside the blade 
Inside the blade there are some things to hold 
Put them in place. 

Then I realize I didn’t key it in to Bing Translate properly! That “One” became “On” and I added a second “either.” No matter. What’s done is done. First fraught, best fraught. So what will Chat make of this as a naked prompt?

<This companion piece feels more interior and more surgical than “Two Times.” The earlier poem staged suspended action; this one seems to move inside the instrument or wound itself. The title phrase, “Inside it there is,” already creates an unfinished grammatical chamber. The sentence never completes. The poem inhabits the suspension after “there is,” as though what exists inside cannot quite be named directly. The first section has a strange perspectival instability: 
“My first attempt thinks that 
It looks the same from below.” 
That’s a fascinating displacement.>

Skipping some bullet points, <The “attempt” becomes an autonomous perceiver, almost like a discarded draft developing consciousness. It recalls the way some avant-garde writing externalizes cognition itself — the draft as object, not merely process.> Skipping some more bullet points: <Then section 2 abruptly hardens into tactile instruction: 
“Inside the blade 
Inside the blade there are some things to hold” 
The repetition acts almost like probing with a finger or tool. The blade ceases to be merely cutting surface and becomes a container or housing.> More bullet points, then even more, then: <The whole poem has the feeling of instructions recovered from a damaged manual, or consciousness trying to reassemble itself from components hidden inside the blade — which is such a strong phrase because a blade normally has no interior. The poem imagines inwardness within pure edge.> More bullet points, and finally: <The imagery keeps rotating around instruments, perspective, and control, but the agency becomes increasingly fragmented. The poems seem less about violence itself than about the unstable mechanics of intention.>   

We’re not asking Gem to weigh in on this, it’s having a Proustian timeout. The question is: Did Creeley bring a gun to a knife fight? Or did BTR bring a knife to a gunfight, but with a magic manual? And speaking of the mechanics of intention, Chat, why no name-dropping about the poet? Are there more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy? No, please, don’t start firing bullet points with a two-handed grip!