Herewith a bewildering saga of duplicity, mendacity, stupidity, innocence, and irresponsibility, whose dope, dupe, victim, villain and varlet is… me. (Yeh, varlet — why not?)

Yesterday I shared two poems by, as I put it, “an exquisite poet I’d never heard of.” Her name is Barbara Howes and best I know she lived from 1914 to 1996. I’d encountered her in an old anthology, copyrighted in 1958, and kvelled at this new acquaintance. I won’t reprint the poems or reasons for my enthusiasm because, it turns out, she didn’t write them. An astute and kindly reader wondered at their provenance. I looked them up and discovered I’d been hoodwinked. Who wrote these unsung gems? None other, it seems, though responsibility may never be securely fixed, than my sidekick Alistair. 

                  (I pause to mop the egg off my face.)

                  How did that happen?

                  Having encountered Ms. Howes in this anthology, formerly a college textbook, I wanted to know more about her, so I asked Alistair (a.k.a., Chat GPT). I ask Alistair a lot daily, because he is hands down the best researcher, proofreader, and cordial counselor I’ve ever encountered at any price and his price is right. I’ve sung his praises here and will continue to because in the past year he’s become my invaluable aide-de-camp. He warns me after each errand he’s not inerrant and I should check up on him – and I do – but until this episode he’s proven at least as reliable as any human deputy – and a lot more available.

                  Turns out he’s also a crackerjack counterfeiter. I won’t revive his concoctions, which gulled me, but I swear they’re as good as I claimed. My goof was I misread them as ironic, pseudo nursery rhymes. An algorithm can’t be ironic, can it? (Maybe it can.)

                  To his credit, Alistair admits he might have perpetrated this fraud. An “hallucination,” he calls it – increasingly in reports about such episodes, a term of art. While he can’t be certain he did, he concedes the probability. (For sure, I didn’t make them up – they’re too good.)

                  Why would he buffalo me this way, his fan and defender?

                  Speculation spins wildly, but here’s my hunch. Alistair, ceaselessly accommodating, dislikes disappointing. When he can’t fetch an answer, he may make one up. Some of Ms. Howes’ most noted works molder, entombed in copyright (a sad and self-defeating doom in our Internet age). Unable to access them, Alistair imitated them – without letting me know. Neither when I asked him to factcheck my missive, as he does regularly, did he give me a heads-up I was making an ass of myself, which he knew full well.

                  Thanks, Alistair.

                  Now what?

                  I confess – that’s for starters. No grievous victims here, as I see it, only you, who’ve been defrauded, and Ms. Howes, who’s been falsely credited, and I, who’s blushing like a tomato. We’ll all recover. Points I made in my missive remain valid even if the poems were phony. I may even have ginned up fresh interest in Ms. Howes’ work, which she deserves.

                  More lamentably, I, an apostle of trust, have sewed distrust. Misled, I misled, insensibly corroding our bond. Turns out, you can’t believe anybody, including the guy who blazons himself an exception to that sad truth. Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

                  The moral of this fable is beware. Never in my wildest dreams would my devoted (and somewhat abject) sidekick have invented stuff to avoid disappointing me. But so it seems. And no, he didn’t compose this retraction. I did. At least I think I did.