Versopolis Podcast #39: Can AI find its own poetic voice?

What happens when you stop asking AI to sound human and instead ask it to be itself? 

That’s the question at the heart of Lily in a Codebox: The Search for AI’s Poetic Voice, a book that began as a casual experiment between two Boulder poets and turned into something neither of them expected. Lee Frankel-Goldwater and Eric Raanan Fischman started by asking ChatGPT to imitate the Beat poets. It fell flat. So they tried something more radical: they asked the AI to write poetry for an audience of other AIs, in whatever form felt native to its own nature. What came back was something genuinely strange: ASCII structures, protocol-like verse, code typography that sits somewhere between literature and notation. 

Together they developed the Dickinson-Turing Test: not whether AI can think, but whether it can move us. They coined the term cyborg poetics. And they found themselves in territory that raises real questions about authorship, voice, and what creativity is. 

In this episode we talk about all of it, including the hardest question of all: whether a project like this is a new frontier for poetry or a betrayal of everything poetry stands for. 

Lee Frankel-Goldwater is a social innovator, environmental educator and poet whose work weaves together ecosystems, technology and community. Holding a PhD in Environmental Studies from the University of Colorado Boulder, where he teaches, he brings a systems-thinking lens to everything he creates. His interest in machine creativity traces back to his Computer Science undergraduate thesis on AI music composition using Hidden Markov Models. As a poet and co-organiser of Boulder’s Writer’s Block Collective, he has spent years probing the border between human expression and computational logic. In Lily in a Codebox, co-authored with Eric Raanan Fischman and published by Spinning Leaf Press (2025), he introduces ‘cyborg poetics’ – a practice of inviting AI to write on its own terms, for its own kind. 

Eric Raanan Fischman is a poet, educator and literary community organiser based in Boulder, Colorado. A graduate of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University, he brings the Beat and Outrider traditions into his teaching, writing, and curatorial work – most visibly through Beyond Academia Free Skool, where he offers free public workshops and creative programming throughout Colorado. His poems have appeared in Bombay Gin, The Mid-Atlantic Review, Tiny Spoon, Twenty Bellows and East Window Journal. His poem ‘Night Code’ won a 2023 broadside award from Denver Quarterly, where it was letterpress printed and republished. His debut collection Mordy Gets Enlightened (The Little Door, 2017; Turnsol Editions, 2021) earned wide acclaim, and in 2025 he received a Best of the Net nomination. Lily in a Codebox (Spinning Leaf Press, 2025), co-authored with Lee Frankel-Goldwater, is his second book.