In my previous blog post, “My Two Lives and One New Tool…,” I wrote about how I use ChatGPT 5.2 as an artificial “intelligence” tool (a small package of a LLM) in my professional and poetic life, emphasizing where and how the tool helps me — and where its power ends. In this post I will keep the tension (balance) between the professional and the poetic, but only in verse, without a more detailed discussion of the professional aspect.
Using my poem “Island” (“Ostrvo”) as an example, I want to illustrate three points I listed as my own testimony about the (im)possibility of the tool helping me in poetry: that the tool can translate poetry very well, that it can interpret it well, but that it cannot write it.
In support of that, here is the translation of my original poem “Ostrvo,” which I wrote without the tool’s help (because in that it is powerless), alongside the way the tool translated it, with a little help from me in the “sensitive” places. Those who have a good knowledge of Serbian and English can, in a parallel blog post, read the original Serbian version and judge the quality of the translation for themselves, as well as notice the difference in meter, which has been adapted to the linguistic context.
Below the poem is an interpretation produced by the tool in response to my prompt.
Island
And tomorrow again: meetings, inbox, endless mail,
Invoices, profit sheets, the balance sheet and score;
What the new project brings, and what it costs, entail;
Decisions, coffee breaks, and questions – ever more…
Perhaps it happens, in some moment – shinning blessed
By Serendipity – when I recall something true,
That can’t be measured, can’t be priced or assessed,
More urgent than all balances, more full, more due –
So, leaving tables, ciphers, files and every fee,
At least in verse I’ll go to Innisfree;
And there with Yeats, among the rarest company
Of dead poets – I’ll join their quiet symphony,
Within the liturgy of beehives and the tide,
Sad and glad – at last, a slave to freedom inside.
Interpretation:
This poem sets up a tense, familiar contrast: the mechanical “tomorrow” of modern work versus a sudden, grace-like opening in the inner life. The first stanza is built as an accumulating list – meetings, inbox, invoices, spreadsheets, projects, decisions – its very rhythm mimicking a conveyor belt. The effect is not to demonize work, but to show how easily a person can be reduced to functions, metrics, and constant “next items.”
The turn comes with the phrase “Perhaps it happens”: a small breach in routine, a moment “shining blessed / By Serendipity,” when memory returns “something true.” That truth is defined negatively – it can’t be measured or priced – and therefore it directly challenges the poem’s earlier vocabulary of assessment and accounting. The speaker discovers an alternate hierarchy of value argues itself into being: what matters most may be precisely what cannot enter a balance sheet.
Innisfree (explicitly tied to Yeats) functions as an inner refuge and poetic homeland, not a literal getaway. “At least in verse” is crucial: the escape is artistic and spiritual, achieved through language and tradition. The “rarest company / Of dead poets” frames poetry as a living continuity across time – a communion where the dead are present not as nostalgia, but as an active chorus the speaker can join, a “quiet symphony” that argues for depth against noise.
The closing image – “the liturgy of beehives and the tide” – consecrates nature itself as a kind of service or ritual, and the poem’s final paradox seals its meaning: “Sad and glad,” the speaker becomes “a slave to freedom inside”. Freedom here is not the absence of obligations, but voluntary belonging to what is higher – truth, beauty, the inherited music of poetry. The poem ends by restoring proportion: tomorrow will return, but so will the island – whenever the inner life breaks through the spreadsheets and calls the speaker back.