National Poetry Month 2023 comes to a close today. I had big plans for this month and not all of them came to fruition, but I am very happy with how my Midjourney experiment went. Every day in April I wrote a line of a poem, ran it through Midjourney and posted one of the illustrations with the line on my Instagram. You can see the whole rough draft here.
I didn’t know how this would go. Halfway through the month I was bored with the whole thing, but I am glad I stuck it out. In the video I have edited the poem, so you can actually go see the original and compare how I’ve changed it. I’ve also made a few changes to the art in the video, but they are all the images the AI created for my line.
I really liked doing this, and I think I’ll try it again for another month, but this time I’ll share on Twitter. Watch the Twitter poem unfold here.
What are your thoughts?
Some truly excellent visions and accompanying lines! I say bravo, do it again. It might serve as an exercise — once you have the image, write to the profound (if it so moves you) without cliche or maudlin notes. The less experienced writer might fall for the latter, so it’s a good exercise to check yourself.
Also do one that isn’t meant to be profound? How about that!
That was an interesting experiment. I wonder if it’s too many images or if the range holds people’s attentions. Thematically, most of the images held together though the pressed grapes, and the grandad with mesh beard stuck out as did a few others. Some were very literal, others more cosmic. I think without the background music it might not have meshed as well. I enjoyed it. 😀
[…] I wrote a poem in April where I fed my original line of poetry into Midjourney and created a video [watch that here]. I wrote and interview for Edgar Allen Poe and asked ChatGPT to answer as if it were Poe. I made a […]