How does Wheelsong contribute to literature?

Artificial Intelligence is a strange one. Often AI makes hilarious errors, and sometimes gets it disastrously wrong. It's like a toddler being potty trained or learning to walk. Comical but also messy. But every now and again, AI can actually get things right, and save us all a fair amount of time. Here's one example, from Facebook's Meta AI model that hangs around beneath posts in Invisible Poets and other groups.

The tab was titled 'How Does Wheelsong contribute to literature?'
Wheelsong Books contributes to literature in several ways:

1. Publishing New and Emerging Authors: Wheelsong has collaborated with numerous first-time authors, showcasing their work in various poetry collections. Some notable publications include:

a) The Sky is a Shade of Forever by Chuck Porretto, exploring themes of nostalgia, satire,
and life observations
b) Echoes of a Fading Star by Emmanuel Chimezie, a daring blend of bold lyricism and experimentation
c) Light Will Return by Iain Strachan, a collection of poetry that explores spirituality, science, identity, and technology
d) Circus of Circles by Aoife Cunningham, a debut collection of poetry that tackles themes of healing, mental health, and vulnerability

2. Promoting Poetry through Anthologies: Wheelsong publishes annual poetry anthologies, featuring over 250 poems from poets worldwide. These anthologies have raised funds for Save the Children, with over £14,000 donated by the end of 2025.

3. Supporting Literary Events and Community Building: Wheelsong organizes roadshows and live events, providing a platform for poets to perform and connect with each other. These events have helped forge lasting friendships among poets and raised additional funds for charity.

4. Mentoring and Developing Writing Skills: Wheelsong publishes textbooks like Creative Deviance by Steve Wheeler, which offers exercises and techniques for poets to develop their skills.

5. Charitable Contributions: Wheelsong's publications and events support Save the Children's global relief work, focusing on education, protection, and aid for children in crisis-stricken areas.

Quite a useful summary of some of Wheelsong's achievements and projects over the last year or so.


Steve Wheeler

Review of 2025 Part 4

During the latter part of 2025, Wheelsong collaborated with several first time authors, which is always both exciting and challenging. Our first new author out of the pen (see what we did there?) was Chuck Porretto, an American author residing in Tallahassee, Florida. Chuck's poetry is unmistakable, because it slides smoothly between tender nostalgia, biting satire and pithy observations on life. His debut offering, The Sky is a Shade of Forever, is a delightful mix of all these themes, written in his inimitable style.

Following closely on the heels of Porretto's book came the debut collection of poetry from one of the most original new talents to emerge from Invisible Poets. Living in Nigeria, Emmanual Chimezie had already featured in several of the charity anthologies Wheelsong had published. We thought it was about time he was honoured with a collection all of his own, and Echoes of a Fading Star did not disappoint. His writing is a daring blend of bold lyricism and unswerving experimentation. We think this collection will be the first of many from this amazing Nigerian poet. 

Always, around the autumn months, it has been Wheelsong's tradition to collate and publish another Wheelsong Poetry Anthology, so the editorial team of Steve Wheeler, Karin J. Hobson and Iain Strachan began the arduous task of reviewing more than 500 submissions from poets across the globe in just two weeks. It was as ever a challenging task to distill such a huge selection of poems down to around 250 pieces that would then be published in Wheelsong Poetry Anthology 7. This volume is a stunning collection, reflected in the beautiful cover photo of trees on the Dartmoor National Park. All proceeds from the sales of this anthology are donated to Save the Children.

Our final Wheelsong publication of the year had been a long time in the planning. Written by Oxfordshire poet Iain Strachan, a retired computer scientist, Light Will Return is an eclectic mix of styles and themes, reflecting his interests in spirituality, mathematics and science. Iain's playful style of writing spans faith and reason, science and mystery, and the past and future and how each can shape our personal identities. The poetry is both grounded and cerebral. Light Will Return will delight all those who have an interest in any of the featured themes and how they can be creatively conveyed. 

So that's it. That was 2025 for Wheelsong and Invisible Poets. If you participated directly in any of the creative output, or attended any of the roadshows, or if you supported our mission by purchasing books or merchandise - we thank you. And not only do we thank you, but the children of more than one hundred countries thank you - for helping to make their childhoods safer, cleaner and better in every way, through our donations to Save the Children. We want to step this effort up in 2026. We hope you will be with us!

Happy New Year

Steve Wheeler

Review of 2025 Part 2

As spring began to arrive in the Northern hemisphere, and the cold of winter began to dissipate, Invisible Poets launched an exciting new initiative. The Invisible Poets Roadshow, sponsored by funding from Wheelsong Books, held its inaugural show in Plymouth, at 44 Embankment Road, a high street coffee bar. In the photos are Matt Elmore, Richard de Bulat and Tyrone Warren.

Guest of honour on the night was Matt Elmore (author of Constellation Road and Average Angel), who arrived in the south west of England steely eyed and ready for any adventure. After sampling the famous Cornish pasty and a cup of English tea, we arrived at the cafe and set up our lighting and sound systems. Soon Matt launched into his road show set, instantly captivating his audience with a machine-gun routine of rapid fire poems. His dynamic stage act has to be seen to be appreciated! Also in the show that night was an open mic section that featured Iain Strachan, Kate Cameron, Nadia Martelli, Richard de Bulat, Tyrone Warren (author of Stealing Fire), Kenneth Wheeler (author of Inspirations) and others. In the photo are Steve Wheeler and Nadia Martelli doing a Live Poets Society broadcast and official launch of Wheelsong Poetry Anthology 6 from Plymouth. 

The following day, there was a tour of the old city and harbours of Plymouth, and a lunch of Fish and Chips on the historic Barbican only two hundred metres away from the Mayflower Steps. Earlier that day Matt and Steve Wheeler were interviewed on radio, discussing their mutual passion for poetry and their shared Christian faith. In the afternoon several poets accompanied us on a visit to Dartmoor National Park.

Subsequent roadshow events held in Derby, Plymouth and Colchester later in the year raised more funds for Save the Children. The Colchester show, held at the Patch Cafe was hosted by Zac Warden and featured a number of poets previously mentioned as well as sets from Sarah Wheatley, Michelle Tarbin, Zac Warden, Graeme Stokes (author of Off the Top of My Head), Sean Timms and Sharon Toner. In the photos below are Zac Warden, Graeme Stokes and Michelle Tarbin, at the Colchester roadshow.

We aim to develop the roadshow further, and are now actively seeking other hosts to bring it to their own hometowns in the United Kingdom. If you have a venue you think would be suitable, and a group of poets who would love to participate, contact Steve Wheeler on wheelsong6@gmail.com to discuss. It won't cost you a penny! One of the best things about roadshows is that poets meet up for the first time, and long-lasting friendships are forged. The photo below of Kate Cameron (Minky) and Nadia Martelli meeting for the first time at the Plymouth roadshow says it all!

Wheelsong Books has also funded the design, development and production of a range of merchandising, including Invisible Poets t-shirt, embroidered baseball caps and hoodies, all of which can be purchased directly from wheelsong6@gmail.com. All proceeds from sales will be donated to Save the Children.  

Thank you to everyone for your continued support of Wheelsong Books and Invisible Poets. We hope to organise a roadshow in your home town somewhere in the UK in 2026. Do get in touch with us!

Steve Wheeler

Light Will Return

Wheelsong Books Ltd is excited to publish our final poetry collection for 2025. It is the debut collection from Oxfordshire poet Iain Strachan, and is intriguingly titled Light Will Return. 

Light Will Return contains diverse and thoughtful poetry that explores the nexus of spirituality, science, identity and technology. Moving smoothly between theology and mathematics, artificial intelligence, psalms and sonnets, Iain Strachan’s collection poses searching questions about personal meaning, faith and what it means to be human in an increasingly mediated world.

Alongside poems that engage with physics, algorithms, and digital culture sit deeply personal reflections about family, memory, love and loss. Childhood, parenthood, doubt, gratitude, and identity are explored with frank honesty and quiet curiosity, grounding the intellectual reach of the collection within ontology—the lived experience.

Playful, questioning and quietly emotional, Light Will Return invites us all to reflect on how faith and reason, science and mystery, and especially our past and future can shape our individual identities. Light Will Return is a delightful collection of poetry that is both intellectual and visceral—and is an offering which we can explore patiently for illumination. 

About the Author:

Iain Strachan lives in Oxfordshire with his wife and daughter. He is a retired computer scientist with a PhD in Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence (AI). He made a career out of AI for engineering and medical applications and now has a career keeping it out of poetry groups! He has been writing poetry on and off since 1993, and more regularly since joining Invisible Poets in 2022. His work, including the title poem for this book, has been broadcast on BBC Radio Oxford, and he has published several poems in the Wheelsong Poetry Anthologies. He is also a volunteer with the Samaritans, and an active member of Abingdon Local Quaker Meeting. 

Iain says: "I am interested in the connections between science, mathematics and spirituality, and combine these in my poems. I believe writing poetry allows us to discover things about ourselves; often lines or phrases seem to write themselves, and only on later examination do I realise what part of my life, my memories, or my spirituality they come from. A completed poem is like a mirror in which you can examine yourself. I call it 'The Lens of Me.' "

"My years as a Samaritans listening volunteer have also given me a passion for raising awareness of mental health, and many of my darker poems are driven by that desire and feelings of empathy for those who suffer."

"The two greatest things for me about writing poetry are the act of creating something myself, and then when someone says that my words spoke to them. It is my hope that some of my words will speak to you and bring some light for you."

You can discover more details about this book and how to obtain your copies at the Wheelsong Books website.

Steve Wheeler

Poetry and Artificial Intelligence

Occasionally we host guest posts on this blog. They are often topical, provocative or simply informative. This guest post by Dr. Iain Strachan is all three. As always, your comments and questions are welcome.

Can AI pass the Turing Test today? by Iain Strachan

In a Invisible Poets Road Show in Derby, Steve Wheeler asked me if I thought AI had passed the Turing test. I replied "Yes ... and No." 

I had just read a poem "A chatBot named Christopher" about Alan Turing, where I had claimed that the answer is "No".

However, AI-generated poetry continues to fool us again and again. I have been fooled by it. I once praised someone's Villanelle on Invisible Poets that on closer examination turned out to be AI generated.

Why does this happen? I think it's to do with the way we interact with pop songs. I asked a member of my family "When you listen to a pop song, do you think about the words?" He replied "Not really. If I know the words, I'll sing along to the tune, but I don't think about what they mean."

I expect most people are like that. Pop songs have to be singable, so the lyrics fit the tune, and so we are only engaging with the words on a superficial level. So they need to flow smoothly, have simple rhyme schemes etc.

Human poetry is different. It doesn't always have a smooth iambic pentameter rhythm; for example:

For thou'rt slave to fate, chance, kings and desperate men (John Donne), or
The soil/is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod (Gerard Manley Hopkins).

See how the strong syllables pile up with no light syllables between. The Hopkins also has enjambment, where the sense carries on over the line break. Song lyrics don't do this - normally each line stands alone.

It's the same with AI generated poetry. It is polished, and flows nicely; each line is self-contained. But, whereas with a pop song, you can find depth and meaning in the lyrics: a story told, or a telling metaphor, if you examine an AI poem carefully, you won't find any depth; it falls apart as a sequence of poetic sounding phrases and clichés strung together with no clear overall message.

So if you find a poem that seems super smooth and polished, take a closer look before you enthuse about it. Don't give the AI fakers their serotonin boost! If it's AI, it will fall apart and you'll find the words of my chatBot poem to be still true:

Chatbots today can't pass the Turing Test
Their show of understanding's fake, at best.

Iain Strachan

Image used under a Creative Commons License

Why AI Can't be Creative

From time to time, we invite members to write guest blog posts on topical issues that impact upon poetry. Here is a fascinating article on AI and poetry/creative writing by our very own Iain Strachan, formerly a computer scientist and always a poet!

One of the keys to original creative work is that it should be.... well, original. It should contain phrases that haven't been seen before - that take us by surprise and delight us. However, a program like ChatGPT will struggle to produce anything like this, because it can only really produce output that is resembles the text and poems that have been used to train it. 

I asked ChatGPT to provide ten possible completions to this line, taken from Gerard Manley Hopkins's poem "God's Grandeur" 

    It will flame out like ... 

Here is what it came up with: 

a comet streaking through the night. 

a candle in the wind. 

a phoenix rising from the ashes. 

the last rays of a dying sun. 

fireworks bursting in the sky. 

a shooting star's brief flight. 

the embers of a forgotten fire. 

lightning splitting the heavens. 

a spark in the dark, then vanish. 

the final flare of a burning match. 

These phrases are all well-known, and not exactly unexpected; they are bland and literal. Compare that with the completion in Hopkins's poem. If you don't already know the poem this will be completely unexpected: It will flame out like shining from shook foil. 

Why is it that chatGPT can't produce stunningly original completions like that? The reason lies in statistics. In generating continuations, it uses probability, and a random number generator that is tuned (like loaded dice) to be heavily biased towards more likely (and hence less surprising) continuations. Also, if it chose an unlikely continuation, it probably won't make sense at all. There are vastly more nonsensical unexpected continuations than ones that make sense. 

What can we learn from this and apply to our own poems? A lot of our writing can be automatic, sometimes creative, but sometimes commonplace. So next time you write a poem, go through the first draft and examine each word or phrase and see if you can make a better one, instead of the expected word, make it unexpected. Make it a metaphor, rather than literal. 

Here's an example from one of my poems, describing the grid system of roads in Washington DC:

Geometric city. Anonymous streets 

Labelled with letters and numbers 

????? the shops into blocks. 

Here are chatGPT's 10 boring suggestions: 

Neatly dividing 

Methodically carving 

Carefully segmenting 

Precisely arranging 

Artfully separating 

Rigorously partitioning 

Strategically placing 

Systematically organizing 

Elegantly splitting 

Thoughtfully grouping 

Here's mine: Cheese-wire. 

I'll bet you didn't see that coming! It was based not on poems I'd seen before but lived experience; how as a kid I was fascinated to see cheese cut up with a cheese-wire.

Iain Strachan

Image from Wikimedia Commons

Flame Wars

This post is by one of our moderators Iain Strachan. It's an important message all members should heed, because it will lead to a more peaceful and constructive environment where we can all create our art together:

What’s a “Flame war”? 

It’s when two people on a social media get into a toxic argument and start hurling insults at each other. It rapidly gets out of hand as the combatants try to outdo each other. 

In Invisible Poets group we do not tolerate negative or abusive comments on people’s poems, nor do we tolerate “flame wars”. While constructive criticism is fine, it is not acceptable just to insult someone’s work, e.g. “Your poem’s a load of crap”. 

If you get a comment like this, please don’t be tempted to retaliate. People who make that sort of comment “know” they’re right and they won’t relent, and more than likely they will just double down. Instead, just report the comment to Admin, and we will deal with the offender. We operate a “one strike and you’re out” - so anyone dissing a poem without any attempt to engage with it will get an immediate ban from the group. 

But also, if you get enraged and retaliate, and get into a flame war, you could also get banned, or at the very least strongly restricted. Your poem, whatever its merits, will be removed from the group if you get into a fight like this. We want to keep this group as a safe place. So play nicely!

Iain Strachan

Image used under a Creative Commons licence from Flickr