Since Two Cowboys Melted Together At The Yellow Deli Like A Year Or Two Ago are real off-the-grid types, who don’t wanna leave any kinduv online footprint, and thus do not have their own blog or Substack, they requested that we host their review of Eric Raanan Fischman and Lee Frankel-Goldwater’s new book about AI poetry, “Lily in a Codebox,” on Boulder Poetry Scene/BluebirdStack anonymously on their behalf just this once.

See here for the origin of how they melted together.

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Howdy, Boulder Poetry Buckaroos… s’there we were at The Yellow Deli, oh a year or two back we s’pose… We’d fallen on tough times, reckon cuz the world was changin s’damn fast folks didn’t need two cowboys melted together like they usta. We still knew plenty ‘bout leather and wood and metal and stone and the hard facts of life n’ death, but these days folks only seemta care bout the soft stories of their unmelted together phones and so forth. So we’d been put out to pasture, y’could say. Which typically meant us hunkerin down all night at the Yellow Deli, nursing a single cuppacoffee, while Boulder tech-comfy city slickers jawed on yoga-ally about their precious glutenfreefull modern world. And, ya know, from time ta time we’d hafta butt in when it seemed they needed some correctin on some matters.

Like those poet boys, Eric and Lee… They were yappin on and on at the next table over ‘bout some robot of their’s which was crankin out groundbreaking poems or some such. Now, let me tell ya, all cowboys have a tender spot for poetry (particularly about lonesomeness and/or freedom), so, git along luddite dogie, their conversation sent a shiver down our melted together spines. And we had no choice but ta take it upon ourselves to educate them on the dangers of The Machines.

“Now listen here, pardners,” we told em to their unweathered faces. “We’ve been around ferra long time, and we’ve seen everything that matters to see. And we can tell ya with the certainty of a bull’s balls that it starts with asking this tin-brained contraption to write ya a sonnet, and next thing ya know it’s got its metal claw-hands on The Bomb, and then fwooop that’s the end of humanity.”

And then, of course, they wanted ta wrangle ‘bout it, tryna convince us their artifishy intellijuju future’s gonna be all bright, baby. But we weren’t swallowin that chili, and, truth be told, were even ponderin maybe settlin the issue by pourin the bottom-gunk of our cold coffee right over that bedeviled laptop of theirs.

Then it was that Eric who quickdrew and fired, “Look two cowboys, one wet and one dry, who are mysteriously fused, it’s not robots I’m afraid of but humans… A robot has never decided to a drop a single bomb on a single person, but humans have always dropped lots of them on lots of people all the time.”

His sass-back bullet surprisingly had enough understanding of the gruff reality of things to rightly quiet our spurs in that moment, but we vowed to ourselves that if Lee and Eric ever published their findins in bookform we’d even the score via dead honest r’vyoo…

And wouldn’t ya know it, just this past month they actually released Lily in a Code Box (we reckon we’re supposta say ‘Spinning Leaf Press 2025’ here), which chronicles their Aye Eye poetry ‘speriment. They spin us a yarn about their little Robot, called ‘ChatGPT,’ and how they were hankerin to know if it could pass this thing they cooked up called the Dickinson-Turing Test – the point at which a Machine’s poem could move ya as much as a human being’s.

Now apparently at first they couldn’t get a lick of original un-rhymey genius outta their glorified toaster, which is programmed to push down the entire history of lit’rature into a narrow slot and pop back out the most predictable medium-brown crusty English from it. So they hadta steer-prod that Sillycon Valley appliance to actually buck some rules, and they figgered the best way would be askin it to invent a whole new language just for an audience of other Machines.

Then, my easily-visible-on-the-open-range-at-night stars, did it start ta get weird. The Robot came up with somethin called “Neo-Binary Visual Verse” that looks like a jumble of codes and symbols and numbers and such. It took a perfectly manmade poem about plums, William Carlos Williams’ “This is Just to Say,” and started crowbarring in helterskelter-like all these top-of-the-typewriter punctuation marks and (ya might hafta take away our Gruff Old Timer Licenses fur usin this word but…) E-Moe-Geez. And it even made some Machine joke renamin it “This is Just to Execute.” Not sure how much it moved ya, but damned if it wasn’t at least somethin new.

Then for another poem The Robot bleep-blooped out the shape of a lily flower. It had roots of binary and stems of bullet points and petals of em-dashes and a little, of what our French-Canadian fur trappin compadres would call,’ ‘Ja Na Say Kwah.’ Something about it reminded ya of your childhood frolickin around in the prairie before ya got so gruff and certain about the nature-a-things. The authors stake the claim that this is the gunsmokey proof for their Dickinson-Turing. And for at least one of us melted together cowboys (wet), it was hard t’imagine The Great Machine Nukuler HoeDown-ocaust could be possible if it had the grace to write a poem such as this.

But the other one of us (dry) still had some questions… It wasn’t so much that the lily wouldn’ta been nice to have in your garden and all, but it was worth takin a second look at the seeds it grew outta. At times throughout the book the authors seemta treat AI like it’s got its own unique soul buried deep under its programmin, and they just need to git down in there and mine it out. But that’s the thing, even if there were some gems down there, they hadta be mined. Could the lily really’ve bloomed in any kinda worthwhile way without the humans? Makes sense if the Machine passes the test, it’s only cuz their prompters like Lee and Eric gotta already be able ta Dickinson themselves.

The trouble with considerin Aye Eye a True Poet is that it seems incapable of ever sayin, “I don’t rightly know,’ or ‘I plum forgot’ or ‘I reckon I don’t feel like it.’ The Machine does not suddenly wake up in the heart of the desert in the heat of the night hearing the hoot of the Great-Horned Owl, as somethin inside demands it try to put some kinduv restless feelins into words, suddenly cryin out to nobody, “Whoa, take ‘er easy there, Pilgrim!” And maybe that hitch ‘tween creation is what truly makes it meaninful. Ya could call it the John Wayne-Turing Test.

S’there we were in the Yellow Deli again, after finishin the book, not quite sure what trail we’d just rode down. The wet one of us was watery-weepin over a codeflower like it come straight from some large language model Louis L’Amour, and the dry one of us was still blowin ‘round like a tumbleweed in a sandstorm, rattled at the notion this digital varmint could still be fixin ta destroy us all, or at least turn our brains to cornmeal mush or rustle up all our jobs.

And then we started unmeltin. Ooze and puddles, flakes and sawdust separatin right there as the fiddly-flutey rustic fairy music of the Yellow Deli played on. But just before we turned into a big ol’ mess for some dreadlocked waiter to mop up, there was still a sticky bit holdin us together like patchin’ tar. It was that whether the Machine made up the lily all by its lonesome or not, it flat surprised us both that such a pretty lil thing could sprout from its ones and zeros at all.

It reminded us of one of the hardest facts of nature – nothin’s certain at all. Even a bull’s balls ain’t that certain (in fact, we seen one with cubes for nuts once). And if nothing’s known t’morrow, ya might as well hitch yer wagon to the good ya see today. Maybe there’s something ta this Cyborg Poetics afterall. Somethin that could maybe spit the furthest chaw outtuv a human poet’s potential, and put more out into the world that makes us feel like wild mustangs stampedin across an endless sagebrush sea.

And then we started meltin back together. Wet and dry mixin up again like a hearty campfire stew. And just then a little dab of Aye Eye crawled outtuv a nearby internet, climbed up our boots and chaps, right over our big buckles, and seeped straight into our guts, meltin right in there with the rest of the meltiness. Which I s’pose we didn’t mind sa much as we figgered. And we reckon from now on, folks’ll hafta call us Two Cowboys And Little Bit Of Robot Melted Together At The Yellow Deli Like A Week Or Two Ago.

If you’d like to read fer yerself you can find “Lily in a Codebox” here!