Bulgaria's Literary Banksy

– A friend from literary circles whom I respect greatly gave me the idea to tell your story, while, of course, preserving your anonymity. He called you “the most dangerous literary terrorist.” How does that assessment sound to you?

– I don't know whether I'm the most dangerous; so far I can't say I've achieved anything grandiose. I haven't won a literary competition with some trick, but I do have quite a few publications in various outlets under fake identities.

For a long time I wrote poetry under my real name. I've entered competitions, won awards; this world isn't foreign to me. I know the competitions and the poetry communities well. I know people in these circles. So this experiment began quite deliberately, in a planned way; only its goal shifted from time to time.

Seeing what was going on, how things stood in this world,

I set out with the idea of criticizing, exposing, even mocking; I wanted to see how far this could go.

At first I started with publications. I also entered a few competitions, but nothing came of those.

– How long ago did you start?

– Two or three years ago. The competitions came later; my focus was on online outlets devoted to poetry. At first my goal was experimental. On the other hand, I wanted to show the true face of these communities.

Every time I took a different approach. My very first attempt was successful and turned into a publication! It went like this: with no inspiration and no particular idea, I sit down and write a few poems into which I put almost no thought at all.

I just see a window blind next to me, a radiator, and out of that I make a short poem with no artistic merit whatsoever.

I wrote a few like that, sent them off and… they were published right away. What's more, the same approach worked with two very different communities.

I took it rather emotionally; I was astonished, indignant at what gets published on the internet. How nowadays everyone is a poet, everyone has a page, there are communities that publish themselves and support their members, but only internally.

My idea was precisely to show that something is off. And in my opinion it definitely worked. But the result was never announced publicly.

– Why not? If you don't show it, how will it ever become clear that something is wrong with the criteria?

– At first the plan was grandiose. I wanted to run a series of experiments and then publish the results in some form, again under a pseudonym. An article would come out in which I'd say: “Look, this person is me, I published this.” The idea was to use these fake identities, these hoaxes, quite deliberately: to publish, to work my way into these communities and compromise them from within.

There would be several fake poets operating in the literary field, then I'd invent a critic to analyze them, and then the author of an article who would present the whole picture…

It was emotional, at times a bit overblown. But it worked. Later, beyond the random associations and seemingly meaningless constructions, I began to experiment. I tried ChatGPT, I created poems in English that then went through Google Translate, and my only role was to tidy up a few quirks of the translation.

I've also tried collective creation. A group of friends gets together, one of us says a random word, the next comes up with another purely by association, and so a piece takes shape that is essentially meaningless, devoid of any idea. But we've done experiments like that, and in the end

these outlets, these communities liked the pieces.

Most of the publications weren't created with the help of AI. The principle was to read a substantial part of a given community's work and try to imitate it. So even when it wasn't AI, the principle was similar: I see what the pattern is, what the model is, and the moment I sit down, I imitate that model, I create something very close to what they do, and they like it.

The times it didn't work—when they didn't publish certain poems or I didn't win a particular competition—I can put down to overdoing it (sometimes we slid into outright mockery, which may have been noticeable). Or to missing the mark with a particular jury. In different competitions, naturally, every jury has certain expectations and favors a certain model. If we don't hit that model, there's no way we'll place. Say one competition encourages writing in classical verse; in another that's absolutely the wrong approach, and free verse, experimental, avant-garde writing is encouraged. When it didn't work, I think that was a factor: I hadn't taken the jury's expectations into account, I hadn't read the pieces that won the year before. The model didn't work because I hadn't managed to imitate well enough.

Then that emotional wave passed, the desire to expose, to compromise. I started thinking about other questions. I had already planned everything, I had lined up people whose faces I would use at future literary readings and appearances. But at some point I rethought my goals. Maybe I got tired of it, maybe I didn't see much point, other questions came up—

even if I succeed, even if this future article comes out, showing the whole process, exposing, accusing, what will I actually achieve?

The communities are closed in on themselves enough; they have a very narrow circle of readers. The same can be said of literary competitions: they're small communities too, where the same people often enter and win. And by and large, the same type of poetry is sought.

In other words, even if I succeeded, I could hardly spark a bigger discussion that would lead to anything meaningful.

– And it is high time exactly that happened. Because the questions are already too big, and burying our heads in the sand is dangerous for the truly talented poets too, and there undoubtedly are some. That's why I ran my experiment, and that's why I'll keep this discussion going.

– What worries me here is precisely this closedness. These questions aren't discussed in any public, more open space. Everything stays locked inside the communities.

The other thing that gradually began to put me off these plans is that in these communities I did, from time to time, find meaningful things,

texts of high artistic merit, authors who in my view are truly talented. Unlike a great many of the rest, who are simply looking for an outlet.

That's another problem: if you're not part of these communities, if you don't enter these competitions, I don't see where you can show your work, how you can reach a wide circle of readers. As much as I criticized these communities, in one of them, for example, I discovered a poet I'd never heard of before and whom I consider truly talented. By compromising the community he belongs to, wouldn't I be blackening his name too? So, on the one hand, exposing these people, showing how untalented, how mediocre they all are, may not have been the best approach, because alongside the mediocre there are talented ones too.

– That's true. What do you do if you're talented? If you don't enter competitions, you're not part of the magazines, you don't publish collections… But today anyone can simply write online.

– Publishing a poetry collection these days really isn't much of an event or a crowning achievement, because again, for people to hear you, for people to come to the launch, you have to be part of some community, there has to be someone to organize the event, to invite people.

Publishing a collection years ago, in a different situation, was a real achievement for a young poet, but now even that is losing its value,

since the reach of your poetry once again depends on your popularity, on the community you belong to. You can't manage on your own, unless you're exceptionally talented and your poetry needs no introduction.

– Are there any such authors today at all? Not being close to these communities, I can't think of any. How did you carry on from there?

– I believe there are such authors, and readers who still look for them. Over the past year I tried something different: publishing in more serious outlets, but again under a pseudonym and experimenting. I decided to try new things, to see how my poetry would be received. I put the other activity on hold for the time being, perhaps precisely because of that sense of pointlessness.

Until I arrive at some concept, a clear idea of how this can really help, how it can be useful. Maybe I won't publish until then.

I managed to achieve much of what I wanted at the start.

They published me, they liked me, they shared me on Facebook along with lots of encouraging comments, which to me was absurd, but also sufficient in itself.

I got my satisfaction after the very first publications and told myself: “There you go: if they publish this, if they like it, then they really have no meaningful criteria, no coherent idea of what quality poetry is. What more do I want?”

– But what are your criteria, on what basis do you judge poetry? Is your relationship with it professional, or only subjective?

– I'm certainly not the most competent critic or the best judge. But I have a background in philology and literature; I can say I look at things from a professional point of view as well.

Of course, when we talk about art and literature in particular, we can't ignore the subjective factor. But when we analyze, when we try to separate quality poetry from poor poetry, however relative those notions may be, there are always some objective criteria. We are, after all, talking about a discipline.

Literary studies is a discipline with very solid foundations, a good enough conceptual apparatus and criteria for what has artistic value.

There's always subjectivity, we can't escape it, but within literary scholarship and literary criticism we can look for our criteria of judgment. I don't think everything should be considered on the basis of “I like it or I don't.” Lately, in my view, the critical eye has gone missing.

– I definitely think so too. And not only in poetry, in every art.

– Authors are far too sensitive, they find it hard to accept criticism from outside, and within the communities themselves I'm inclined to believe that encouragement and praise prevail.

– Your experiments prove it, too.

– My criteria may not be all that solid; I've approached things more or less subjectively, especially at the beginning, but in my judgment I try to strip my view of the poetry of my personal impressions of the poet.

How far I've succeeded, I don't know. That's one of the reasons I stopped: when I sensed things were getting personal, that I was starting to judge them as people and not just as authors. That things were more emotional than they should be, that I was losing the thread of objectivity. Then I stopped for quite a while.

I'm not that close to these people; I know some of them, but that's as far as it goes. They haven't obstructed me in any way, they haven't criticized me. I have no personal scores to settle.

But I have felt almost personally slighted because of my participation in certain competitions.

Whenever I wasn't recognized, I'd try, with interest, to assess what had won…

– I don't follow things that closely, but award-winning pieces that I too find mediocre certainly come up often. What I think doesn't matter, though, which is why I ran my experiment: let's see what the jury sees. Without meaning to, I ended up with not one but two juries. Which not only failed to tell apart the poems generated by artificial intelligence, but in 2 out of 2 cases ranked them among the best. I invited people from the winning juries, I invited many poets and people involved in the field to join the conversation. I think we have very serious food for thought. So far, few have responded. Why do you think that is?

– That's one of the problems that needs to be raised. In the competitions, without disputing the competence of the people on the juries (we have established names among literary scholars, writers, poets and so on), something is clearly off.

That has disappointed me, that has discouraged me from entering competitions. Exactly what we're talking about. The winning pieces. I've asked myself why I do it. What is the deeper goal, the deeper meaning of my experiment? After all, we want quality work, quality contemporary poetry. We want it to matter, to be talked about, discussed. Even if only as part of an argument.

For that spirit to be there, the one that was typical of other times, when literature, when poetry meant something. The figure of the writer, of the poet meant much more.

At the very least, as readers, that's what we miss: eagerly awaiting someone's new collection. Eagerly awaiting our favorite poet's piece in some magazine.

It's not so much that I, as an author, want the bar to be higher so my poetry can win the competition. I'm very far from that thought, and an award in some literary competition has long stopped interesting me.

For me it's more important and more valuable to read, to consume quality literature, and for it to have some social significance even.

Rather than for this literature to be regional, local, confined within the borders of a community of 20 people.

– But if AI already writes very well, is there any point in us carrying on?

– Here another question comes up. Does it really write well?

– How do we check, if not by submitting its work to proven juries of specialists?

– AI imitates, after all. We give it some data representing a certain type of poetry, a certain type of writing, and in my view its role is rather to imitate the model that's liked.

The bigger problem is who decides what model is liked.

Who sets the standards, who sets the fashion?

– Maybe we no longer need poetry. You can see the decline of the whole phenomenon of waiting for your favorite poet to publish a new collection, and it's not just a Bulgarian phenomenon.

– I'm rather skeptical of that interpretation.

This sense of exhaustion probably isn't new, and in every era every author may have asked: “Can I offer something new, can I do something different?”

Ideas of poetry, of art change; that's why we have different movements that replace one another or coexist, different models that come back.

Art always finds a way to renew itself, to reach people.

I don't think we've reached the point where poetry has become meaningless, where creativity has become meaningless.

It's simply a symptom of something; maybe we can't quite define it, but in my view the logic is this. Artificial intelligence is good, even better than humans at this, because it copies what's liked, what's in vogue.

– Not necessarily. Through your prompt you can step in and change the direction. Then it becomes a joint creation.

– But the question remains whether, and to what extent, what AI creates is real creativity. Still, in my view there's no difference between what it does and the algorithm many real authors follow. They watch the trends, see what the dominant model is, and somehow, if they imitate it well enough, they win the competition. And to me that's the more fundamental problem. I haven't resolved it for myself.

How can this be fixed? How can competitions become something of national significance? That ought to be the idea behind competitions: how an author who is talented but unknown can reach an audience. In my view that should be their purpose. To discover someone who is different, original, not repeating the model.

If that can't happen, I don't see much point in competitions in their current format. Not that they shouldn't exist, but perhaps their concept needs rethinking.

– And here we have something more, what I call the elephant in the room. We have two competitions, 150 authors take part, two of them (at least) with generated poems. And both end up in the selected top 10. Maybe one of the other 130 authors will enter something generated next year? But, unlike me, they won't admit it, because it's now completely impossible to prove which text was generated.

– There was talk of introducing a declaration of authorship, but that solves nothing; it's a drop in the ocean.

These situations raise many questions. Still, in my view it's some kind of beginning. They don't give us answers. I didn't reach an answer either, and that's why I stopped. Because I told myself: “So what?” I put nothing into this poem, and yet it's liked and accepted as valuable. As a work with some artistic qualities. So what?

– Maybe we should go back to writing not to win a competition, but because we feel an inner need to.

– That's one option: to give up on external factors. To give up fame, awards, people's attention. But that's still an individual choice. To write more for myself and less for others or for something else.

Poetry, art in general, doesn't aim to make its author famous.

We have many examples of authors who had little or no popularity in their lifetime and were rediscovered after their death.

If I have an inner need to write, if it helps me express myself, understand myself, and as a side effect makes me popular, if that way I reach other people and help them understand themselves a little better, break away from the everyday and so on (all those functions of art), then there's meaning in it. But here again we come down to personal choice.

If I'm chasing the external, the glittering, the collection that will bring me (hardly income, but probably) attention, fame, and from there some other perks, then things are wrong from the outset. We can then use artificial intelligence quite freely, without any pangs of conscience. Because…

– …not using it would amount to the same thing.

– Still, I assume there's software that detects when AI has been used…

– Sadly, for text that battle is over. We can no longer have such a solution.

– The point is that for the people who take part, for the people who win such competitions, they aren't meaningless. If you set out with the idea of winning a competition, nothing else matters. Whether someone else wrote the poem for you, whether you wrote it but took the idea from someone else, whether you're imitating some author, or AI wrote it for you—it's all the same.

Sometimes it's hard to prove, sometimes it's obvious. But once you do it, you've lost the meaning of art for yourself.

Again, we're talking about a subjective view, a personal decision. I do it because it means something to me.

And the point of these stories is to spark this discussion and see what comes of it.

If more people are drawn into the discussion, if it reaches more authors, more people who want to publish, to enter these competitions, maybe at some point something will change in their personal perception too.

– Exactly, the discussion—that's what I'm trying to do. That's why this whole site exists, with more than 400 digital stories by now, which I put together only in my free time. But it also matters how the juries themselves approach all this.

– I wish the members of future juries success. I can't offer a ready-made answer. What we're doing is certainly a step toward the answer. In any case, I don't think poetry has run its course.

I don't think art has become meaningless, or that artificial intelligence can already do much better in this field.

Yes, it's useful in certain areas, but in my view using it in art, in creating a work, is problematic.

That's another discussion…

– And we'll continue it! But how long will poetry stay alive? When will we know it has run its course?

– I'll quote the words with which Sartre ends his essay What Is Literature?:

…the world can do without literature. But by that logic it can also do without man, can't it?

Art, literature, cannot be considered apart from the human being. Although the humanities are probably going through a period of crisis, I believe we will need the study of the human, as well as poetry, for as long as we need the human being and the human itself.

– So do I. Thank you from the bottom of my heart for agreeing to tell this instructive story!