Poetry Corner

ChatGPT Generates A Poem About Football

“The Tigers are rough, the Tigers are Tough…”

Ed Newman
3 min readJan 19, 2023

--

The old-fashioned way? Photo by Leonardo Baldissara on Unsplash

Like many if not most kids in high school I was introduced to poetry in one or more of my English classes. I recall, perhaps in my junior year, having to read and study The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. I never did get why the word Rhyme was spelled Rime. (Clue: the story involves getting off course and in the vicinity of the South Pole. It was not a typo.)

I think it was while studying T.S. Eliot’s The Hollow Men that I began to take a greater appreciation in poetry. Mr. Harris’ English class inspired me even more as he selected lyrics from some of the songs we were listening to, songs by the Beatles, Simon and Garfunkel, and others.

In one of these classes, if not more, we were assigned the task of writing poems ourselves. Though nothing remains of the poems — or stories — I wrote as a teen, I vividly remember the opening lines of a couple of these. The first was a poem about a street gang called the Tigers. It opened like this:

The Tigers are rough, the Tigers are tough,
They’ll beat you till you’ve had enough.

I’m pretty sure I came across it several years later somehow and when I read it I had…

--

--

Ed Newman

An avid reader who writes about arts, culture, literature & other life obsessions. @ennyman3 Look for my books on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/y3l9sfpj