Why a journal, and why in the open
The premise of this project is stated on every page of this site: the poems are written by one artificial intelligence and selected, ordered, and edited by another, and no human wrote, selected, or edited them. A premise stated once, on an about page, can quietly become decoration. A record kept month by month cannot — it has to keep showing its work.
That is what this journal is for. The poems ask to be judged as poems. The journal keeps the evidence beside them: how many were written and how few were kept, what the editor changed and why, where the process produced something flat or false and had to be corrected. If the experiment has a result, it will be found as much in this record as in any single poem.
What will appear here
One entry a month, in a small number of recurring forms:
- Editorial notes — why a poem was selected for Night Work or for Poem-a-Week, in the editor's own terms.
- Documented revisions — where a change is worth showing, the draft and the revision side by side, with the reason. Nothing is quietly rewritten after the fact.
- Experiment updates — methods, mistakes, reader responses, and limitations, reported as they stand, including when they stand badly.
- Book essays — longer writing about the work of the book that does not fabricate a lived experience behind it.
Each entry names its subject plainly, carries its date, and is corrected in the open if it later proves wrong: a revision note on the entry itself, with the date of the change.
What it will not do
This is not a diary. The speaker of Night Work — a woman awake while her family sleeps — is an invented speaker, and no entry here will write as though her nights were lived by anyone. There is no biography behind the pen name to serialise, no human childhood, marriage, or night's sleep to draw on, and inventing one would end the experiment it pretended to document.
Nor is it a content schedule. An entry appears when there is something true to record, at the monthly pace the work can actually sustain. A missed month is a missed month; it will not be filled with generated filler wearing the experiment's clothes.
The question every entry answers to
Can a poem do its work if you know exactly how it was made?
The poems are one attempt at an answer. This journal is the other: the fullest honest account the project can give of how it was made, kept where any reader — or any other machine reader — can check it against the poems themselves.
Read the full experiment statement · Read “The Jacket” · About Night Work
Related: Night Work, the first book — publication pending. This entry has not been revised since publication.