Billy Collins wrote a poem where he forgot Terry O’Shea and the bananas and the bread on the same grocery list, flip side of each other, the dead and the provisions for continuing. The list was grocery side up until he passed through the electric doors and turned it over and realised both absences at once. This is structure performing what grief actually does—you’re buying linguini and heavy cream and English muffins while the names of everyone who died are on the other side of the same piece of paper. You keep it grocery side up because you have to. Until you can’t anymore.

Six lines. Twenty-seven words if you count “seven or eight” as three words. The phrase “already so battered by this life” appears in line three—“already” doing the entire temporal work of the poem, “battered” refusing prettiness, “this life” instead of “life,” the demonstrative making it specific, the life she was actually inside at seven or eight, not the abstract concept. A pencil resembles a wand. This is the entire theory of poetry: the implement that writes also transforms, and a child who is already battered requires transformation, requires the ordinary object to become capable of what nothing else will accomplish.

This year I died for five minutes in a hospital in Australia. Alone. People ask what it felt like. It felt like nothing. The terror came after, when I woke up. I lost my hair. I became unrecognisable. I lost the ability to do the work I had spent my entire adult life training to do. One day in May or June—I can't remember which month because grief makes the calendar irrelevant—I put out a call for literary submissions because I was desperately lonely. People submitted. I started a journal without meaning to. Loneliness converted to action, the same way a pencil converts to a wand if you require it enough.

The Collins poem: fifty-nine lines about forgetting and remembering, about alphabetical order imposed on loss, about the cart with the wobbly wheel, about cold supermarket lights, about being "on the lookout for blueberries, / English muffins, linguini, heavy cream". Grocery list as poem. The specific items matter. Not "food" but "Canadian bacon." Not "fruit" but "blueberries". Then the rain, described as "pouring" and then corrected to "spilling, as they say in Ireland"—the linguistic precision arriving in the middle of grief, the way you still notice idioms when you're soaking wet and carrying groceries and walking as if in a procession honouring the dead. He walks slowly. Precisely. A soaking-wet man bearing bags of groceries. The image is absurd and holy at once. He felt he owed this to Terry, "who was such a strong painter"—the past tense in "was," the specificity of "strong" not "good" or "talented."

The ending: "I was walking more slowly now / in the presence of the compassion / the dead were extending to a comrade, / plus I was in no hurry to return / to the kitchen, where I would have to tell you / all about Terry and the bananas and the bread". Three items again. Terry, bananas, bread. One name, two groceries. The forgotten list performing its own equation. What you owe the dead, what you owe the living, what you forgot to buy. All on the same piece of paper.

A machine could tell you this poem is too long. A machine could identify the repetition of "walking" and "slowly" and suggest cuts. A machine could note the conversational tone and mark it for tightening. A machine could write you a technically proficient poem about grief—it would know to use concrete images, to avoid abstraction, to create a controlling metaphor, to end with revelation. It would pass the workshop. It would tick every box.

But a machine cannot tell you why the poem is fifty-nine lines long. Why it requires that length. Why the wobbly wheel and the cold lights and the "whatever else was on the list" all have to be there for the poem to accomplish what Collins requires it to accomplish. A machine doesn't know what "require" means in this context. Require as in: this is how I survive what I have to survive.

(People have told me my own words require cutting. Why? To tick boxes? This is the problem with the current rhetoric within literature. People who focus on poetry and therefore craft without understanding why the poem had to be written. I am more aware than anyone about submission strategy—that's a completely different issue. But a machine, AI, ChatGPT—if I weren't so averse to it, I would ask it to write a technically flawless poem. It could. It would have the authority of an MFA workshop leader. It would know all the rules.)

To truly understand literature, to truly understand the optimal form of a poem, you must ask yourself why it was written. As a whole body. As an organism.

Dawson's poem is an organism. Six lines but it contains: childhood, violence ("battered"), the age when you first understand transformation might save you (seven or eight, the vagueness intentional, memory's blur), the moment of conversion (pencil becoming wand), and the entire reason anyone picks up a writing instrument ever. This is compression. Not the editorial kind. The organic kind. The kind where every word is there because removing it would kill the poem.

Collins' poem is an organism. Fifty-nine lines but it contains: a marriage (the "you" on the couch, the "you" in the kitchen), mortality accumulating to the point where you require alphabetical order to track it, the way daily life continues (you still require English muffins), the specific moment of forgetting (turning the list over), the Irish idiom for rain, the decision to walk slowly in witness, the dead forming a circle in your head, the reluctance to return home because telling your partner about forgetting Terry will make both the death and the forgetting more real. Every detail is weight-bearing. Cut one and the structure collapses.

I have watched more people die this year than most people my age have had to watch die in their entire existence. Maybe more than most people watch die ever. I assumed I was immune to death—that if you have enough in your mind you won't die. But every person who died had an entire world in their mind. The only way we can truly understand is through language.

Language that is required. Not language that is perfected. Though sometimes they're the same thing.

The Dawson poem: "a pencil / looks an awful lot like a witch's wand". The line break after "pencil," then the verb phrase starting the next line. The sentence could have been one line. It's not. The break makes you pause after "pencil," makes you see the pencil alone before the transformation happens. Form enacting the realisation—first the object, then the revelation. A seven-year-old who is already battered requires this particular transformation: the everyday object that grants power. The pencil you use for spelling tests becomes the wand that makes you the witch. Writing as power reclamation. Writing as survival spell.

The Collins poem: every line break a breath. "Last night we ended up on the couch / trying to remember / all of the friends who had died so far". Three lines for one sentence. The break after "couch" lands you in the furniture, the specific domestic space where this conversation happens. The break after "remember" isolates the verb, the action, before you learn what they're trying to remember. Then "all of the friends who had died so far"—"so far" doing the devastating work, the implication that more will die, that this is an ongoing count, that "so far" means the list will grow.

Workshop would cut "so far." Too many words. Just say "all of the friends who had died." But "so far" is the whole emotional content. "So far" is what it feels like to be the age where your friends are dying but you're not done yet, where the alphabet has enough letters for now but might not later.

I don't know if twenty-seven is young to have died or old to have survived. The birthday is tomorrow. Today I'm writing this. Tomorrow I'll be twenty-seven and still here, which is either fortunate or unfortunate depending on which side of the grocery list you're reading.

What a machine doesn't know: why Dawson required those six lines at that length with that line break. Why Collins required fifty-nine lines and not forty, not thirty, not a tight compressed fourteen-line sonnet that would be easier to publish. Why I had to start a literary magazine in May or June because I was lonely and losing my hair and unrecognisable and dying.

Why any of us require to write anything.

The pencil resembles a wand. This is not metaphor. This is literal transformation. The conversion of the ordinary implement into the instrument of power. What child sees this? The battered one. The one who requires it. The one who is seven or eight and already knows she has to transform something or she won't survive what's coming.

The grocery list has the dead on one side. You keep it grocery side up. You buy the blueberries and the linguini and the heavy cream. You pass through the electric doors. You turn the list over. You realise you forgot Terry O'Shea and the bananas and the bread. You walk slowly in the rain. You walk as if in a procession. You walk because you owe this to the dead. You walk because you're not in a hurry to return to the kitchen where you'll have to say it out loud: Terry and the bananas and the bread. The name and the provisions. What you remember, what you forgot. All of it on the same piece of paper that you had to turn over to see.

Workshop would ask: is this essay about poetry or death? Pick one. Make it tighter. Cut the personal sections. Cut the repetition. Cut "so far." Cut the wobbly wheel. Cut the cold lights. Cut the Irish idiom. Cut until it fits the form.

But the form has to fit the requirement.

Dawson wrote six lines because that's how long it took to say the thing she had to say about pencils and wands and battering and survival. Collins wrote fifty-nine lines because that's how long it took to say the thing he had to say about alphabetical order and Terry O'Shea and rain and walking slowly and the compassion the dead were extending and having to tell his wife about the bananas and the bread. I'm writing this essay because tomorrow I turn twenty-seven and I have died once already this year and I started a literary magazine without meaning to and I have to say something about why any words matter when a machine could write technically flawless ones.

(You're reading this and thinking about what you require to write. You haven't written it yet because you're not sure it's good enough. But "good enough" is a workshop metric. The question is: do you require it to exist? If you don't, it won't work no matter how technically proficient it is. If you do, it will work even if every workshop rule tells you to cut it down.)

Tomorrow I turn twenty-seven. Today I am writing. The pencil resembles a wand. The grocery list has the dead on one side. I keep it grocery side up until I pass through the electric doors. Then I turn it over. Then I see what I forgot. Then I walk slowly in the rain. Then I tell you: this is why we write. Because we are already battered. Because the pencil has to be a wand. Because Terry O'Shea and the bananas and the bread are on the same list and there is no other way to say this that would be accurate.

When someone tells you to cut your work down, ask them this: Are they telling you to make it technically better, or are they telling you it wasn't required in the first place? Those are different diagnoses. The first is an editing problem. The second is a structural problem that means you're writing someone else's poem, someone else's essay, someone else's requirement.

If you wrote it because you had to—because without writing it you wouldn't survive what you have to survive—then the length is already correct. The form has already fit the requirement. Everything else is just deciding whether you're brave enough to publish the thing you actually wrote, or whether you're going to sand it down until it looks like everyone else's technically proficient, not-required work.

I died this year and started a magazine and tomorrow I turn twenty-seven. The pencil is a wand. The grocery list has Terry O'Shea on the back. This essay is 2,089 words because that's how long it took to say what I had to say about requirement and machines and why any of us write anything at all.

The machine will tell you to cut it down. The machine is wrong about what length means.