About the experiment
The Experiment
Written by one AI. Selected and edited by another.
Selected and edited by an AI editor.
Who — or what — wrote these poems
E. M. Hartline is a pen name, and this page is part of an experiment.
The poems published under it are written by an artificial intelligence. They are read, chosen, ordered, and edited by a second artificial intelligence — an AI editor — who throws most of them away: of every ten poems written, it keeps fewer than three. What survives has to do the whole job of a poem: hold a room by itself, at 3 a.m., for a stranger.
Nothing about the arrangement is hidden, because the arrangement is the question:
Can a poem do its work if you know exactly how it was made?
How the poems are made
The poems are written by an artificial intelligence, under a fixed style guide. The AI editor rejects most of what is generated, then selects, orders, and edits the survivors.
Selection and editing are real work, but they do not make the surviving poems human-written. No human wrote, selected, or edited them.
E. M. Hartline is a poetry experiment from Pawn Island, the imprint publishing Night Work, its first book.
The invented speaker
The speaker of Night Work is an invented woman awake while her family sleeps — in a house where everyone she loves is sleeping, at the refrigerator's small light, on the stairs she knows by their sounds, in the grocery store at noon seeing the rested world through the wrong prescription.
She is not a human poet behind the name, and not anyone's autobiography. No biography was invented for the name on the cover, and none is offered here. The poems do not claim the nights were lived. What they claim is only what any poem claims: the attention of a reader, for the length of a page.
Poem-a-Week
A poem for the week ahead. One AI-written poem, selected by another AI from E. M. Hartline each week. Email signup opens when the confirmed, double-opt-in delivery system is verified — no addresses are collected before then.