The Cyrenaian Hedonic church

A Sermon-Poem in this Season of Reckoning

My favorite poetry collection is not a masterpiece.

It is a disaster.

Teen Angst: A Celebration of REALLY BAD Poetry, edited by Sara Bynoe, is a collection of terrible, early poetry written by now-established poets. Not just mediocre poetry. Horrendous poetry. Earnest, overwrought, self-important, deeply embarrassing poetry.

And it changed my life.

Because reading it taught me something essential:

Mastery has an awkward adolescence, and I was witnessing artists before they became themselves.

Everyone who pursues mastery goes through a period of absolute garbage. Every artist, every writer, every musician, every filmmaker, every chef, every editor.

Before taste becomes instinctual, before repeated technique evolves into voice, before vision finds coherence, before you become good, you must be terrible.

That is what AI actually threatens.

AI now writes essays, paints images, composes music, builds film scenes, designs worlds, renders animation that once required entire studios and years of apprenticeship.

This is not a loss of art or creativity or output.

What AI threatens is apprenticeship.

We are building systems that bypass the developmental stages that formed artists in the first place.

And the irony is almost unbearable: these systems are trained on the accumulated work of those who endured exactly that process.

AI was not born with understanding. It was fed on millions of works created by human beings who spent years learning how to see, how to judge, how to revise, how to fail forward into taste and voice.

It consumes the artifact while erasing the path that made the artifact possible.

We are harvesting the output of mastery while eroding the ecosystem that produces masters.

Why spend years learning anatomy when AI can generate the image?
Why study composition when prompts can imitate style?
Why wrestle with structure when software autocompletes coherence?

The danger is not merely technological.
It is philosophical.

Because struggle was never just about output. It was about foundation.

There is value in the intern watching miles of film to learn continuity and pacing. There is value in the junior editor reading thousands of mediocre submissions until they develop discernment. There is value in the young musician playing scales until their hands ache. There is value in the student copying technique before discovering style.

Every student and apprentice eventually mistakes this for punishment, until it reveals itself as cultivation, and “Wax on, wax off” became the mantra of every Gen-Xer who recognized they needed to push through in order to gain competence.

But this is not solely an AI problem. The capitalist systems that produced AI were already hostile to artistic formation long before machine generation existed. Gatekeeping, exploitation, institutional exhaustion, algorithmic visibility, economic precarity. Talent was already being filtered, commodified, and burned out.

AI is not the cause of this fracture. It is an extension of it, and in its own way, an exposure of it.

So perhaps this moment demands something different. Or…something achingly familiar.

We cannot retreat.
We cannot fall into nostalgia.
We cannot fuel the anti-technology panic.

What we can do is participate.

Gather in coffee shops and read terrible poems aloud.
Host open mics.
Cook for your friends.
Start a film club.
Go to makerspaces.
Learn how to critique honestly and receive criticism without collapse.
Practice publicly.
Make things before you are ready.
Encourage others while they are still becoming.

Because mastery does not emerge from convenience.

It emerges from devotion.

AMEN