"The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth." — Jean Cocteau

Bad Metaphor

Your metaphors are terrible. We should talk about that. Not a grammar checker having a midlife crisis — a poetry workshop with taste, opinions, and the courage to tell you why your image collapses.

I. Philosophy

The best teachers have
opinions they'll defend

Other AI writing tools evaluate poetry the way a form letter evaluates a novel — by checking boxes. Bad Metaphor is different. We trained an educator with genuine aesthetic conviction: a model that doesn't just flag clichés but performs cliché autopsy — dissecting why the expression fails, what the poet originally reached for, and what unexplored image still lives beneath the dead language.

This is pedagogy, not evaluation. A mentor who reads deeply, responds with voice, and earns trust through the quality of their attention. The kind of teacher who might say your sonnet's volta arrives too early — and then show you three ways it could pivot that you hadn't imagined.

“Tell all the truth but tell it slant — success in circuit lies.”— Emily Dickinson
“A poem is a machine made of words, but it is a machine that runs on feeling.”— The Educator Model, during training
II. Architecture

Two minds, one workshop

The system pairs two specialized models in a visible, editable dialogue. You see every instruction, every critique, every revision — and you can intervene at any point.

Critique & Pedagogy

The Educator

A fine-tuned model with a distinct poetic voice, strong aesthetic opinions, and deep knowledge of prosody, form, and the history of verse. Trained on curated critique, cliché autopsy datasets, and pedagogical dialogue.

  • Genuine voice, not neutral evaluation
  • Cliché autopsy: dissects what failed and why
  • Form-aware: scansion, volta, enjambment
  • Suggests specific, actionable revisions
  • Configurable personality & aesthetic stance
critiquerevision
Generation & Revision

The Poet

A generation model specialized in producing original verse and implementing revisions. Receives structured critique from the Educator and produces targeted rewrites — or entirely new work from prompts.

  • Original poem generation from prompts
  • Targeted revision from Educator feedback
  • Revision on demand from Educator feedback
  • Style-aware: can emulate forms and modes
  • Constrained generation (meter, rhyme, etc.)
III. The Workshop

Transparent orchestration,
human in the loop

Every model interaction is visible. You control critique depth, educator tone, and focus. Daily Poet subscribers get voice mode — spoken feedback read aloud. Volta adds visual analysis: cliché X-ray, trajectory, velocity profile, and more.

educator: v2.1 · poet: v1.8

Workshop Controls

Educator Tone
Critique Depth deep
Focus
Voice mode
Daily Poet

Poem Draft

His hands, once strong as oak, now tremble likethe autumn leaves that dance upon the breeze,and time has stolen what was mine to keep—
Begin WorkshopVoice mode
Educatorspoken
Cliché autopsy — "strong as oak": This simile died sometime around 1847. But here's the thing worth saving: you're reaching for something about the material quality of his hands…
Poetrevision
His hands that bent the rusted garden gate now hesitate above the sugar bowl—
[ ✓ accept ]   [ ✎ edit ]   [ ↩ re-critique ]

Critique received. Request a revision from the Poet.

Request Revision
VoltaVoice modeCliché X-Ray · Trajectory · VelocityRevision panel