As W.H. Auden once wrote in “In Memory of W. B. Yeats“:
. . . poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.
If poetry makes nothing happen, it sometimes uncannily anticipates what will. See the poem facing Norman O. Mustill’s 1967 collage, below. The poem was first published in 2018 by Cold Turkey Press. Now see the report of April 7, 2026, in The New York Times: Anthropic, the artificial intelligence company, has built a new A.I. model that its executives say is capable of cracking the critical software programs of every major operating system and browser anywhere.
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