Now and then, for fun, I feed one of my poems into some AI platform and ask what school of poetry the poem is similar to. I know I don’t really fall into any particular school because my tastes and interests are too varied. I’m as likely to write free verse as to use traditional forms; I like image-based poems, poems based on dreams, philosophical verse, and visual poems. AI has classified the poems I’ve entered as imagist, deep image, surrealist, neo-formalist, and science poetry. (That last one I had to look up because I’d never heard of science poetry…go figure).
“The Sun’s Face Burned” is a poem that will be in my next book, A Song of Glass: Dreams, Stories, and Poems. I haven’t fed it into AI, but I’m guessing it would fall somewhere in the vicinity of imagist / deep image / surreal poetry. In the end, I’m not sure what the labels really mean. I know they’re important to some people, but I just read and write what I like. If you’d like to take a shot at categorizing this poem, leave it in the comments 😁
The Sun’s Face Burned
The sun’s face burned
where the drowned lake lay
by shores buried in stones
and shrubs growing tangled shadows
Mountains stretched frostbit fingers
into thin air turning blue
above fir trees too wooden to dance
with the wind who blew herself away.
