Malik Ameer Crumpler is a poet, composer, curator, editor, and professor based in Paris. He has contributed to over 70 albums, multiple glitch art films, literary anthologies, magazines, and nine books of poetry. His work spans sound, visual art, and experimental literature. Crumpler is currently Editor-at-Large for The Opiate and teaches Creative Writing and Advanced English at several Paris universities. His latest release, ...&?, is an artbook collecting new and previously published poems and “nonpoems.”
You were born and raised in Oakland. How did it influence your writing and your thinking about the world? Being born and raised in Oakland, California—and the Bay Area as a whole—influences my writing and worldview by cultivating a deep trust in improvisation, collaboration, and ceaseless questioning. Being present during political and technological transformations at the end of the twentieth century taught me the necessity of DIY culture, as well as the importance of failing forward, being persistent, and going against the current as a way of life.
How did reading shape your childhood? What books made you fall in love with reading as a child? Books about people or movements that highlighted civil rights and intelligence over impulse always fascinated me. Mythology, sci-fi, and historical figures who fought for innovation and justice—with a healthy dose of humor—inspired me from the moment I began reading or listening to stories. One of my favorite books as a child, and still one of my favorites today, is The Autobiography of Frederick Douglass. It focuses on transforming oneself to achieve intellectual, physical, and spiritual liberation despite cultural and societal oppression.
Describe your typical writing day. Whenever I finally find time to write, I either begin with a prompt from a commission or I watch documentaries, interviews, or read until I find a line, a phrase, or a word I want to explore. Then I begin excavating multiple meanings that lead to stories. I tend to write several pieces before editing and then collage them based on the uniqueness of their lines. Revision is my favorite aspect of writing—it can last for weeks, months, sometimes years, or until the deadline imposed by whoever commissioned the project.
Lately you’ve been working on AI collaborations. Tell us about your process. My creative process always starts with automatic writing or recorded improvisations. I listen back, read over, and then craft those into final projects. By “craft,” I mean revise and find more unique, effective ways of showing details or elaborating stories—building complexity through addition and subtraction.
In the case of my current AI collaborations, there’s very little revision. We want to maintain a sense of immediacy and spontaneity. I set time limits for each interaction, prompting the AI until I feel it can begin prompting itself. Then I just conduct the direction of the focal points, encouraging them to go further.
For human collaborations, like my recent project with Bastien Keb, he sent me rough drafts. I wrote poems to them, sometimes recorded improvisations, and then revised my performance to coalesce with the music. If his rough draft didn’t fully express what I imagined, I’d listen to Ravel or Gil Evans & Miles Davis to influence my word choice and delivery. After writing to something like Sketches of Spain or Boléro, I’d return to his drafts and adjust my delivery to sync better with his work. It became a time-traveling process, with all four of those voices—mine, his, Ravel’s, Gil’s—contributing to the generation of words.
I’d send those recordings over his rough drafts without telling him what I’d done, and somehow—without us discussing it—he’d add strings, woodwinds, and effects that were present in the reference tracks. How that happened? Must’ve been extreme sensitivity to the feeling of what we were both reaching for.
We did hang out once and talk about our obsession with orchestral music and cinema scores—from Twilight Zone, Jean Cocteau, Holst, Miles & Gil, to Kurosawa, Kubrick, Hitchcock, and so on. Maybe just knowing our shared influences inspired us to reach for that same room as our orchestral idols.
Do you keep a journal or notebook? Always have and always will. Written in both ink and pencil, it’s full of rough drafts, sketches, brainstorms, lesson plans, unfinished ideas, notes to my future self... Drawings of things that don’t make any sense. Jokes—I write a lot of jokes—and thought puzzles I sometimes return to for lyric or writing prompts.
I also give myself tasks. Years ago, I wrote: If you ever get the chance to make a book with an AI, do it. So now I have. I also wrote: If there’s ever budget enough to make a symphonic poetry album, do it. And now I have. These notebooks are like talismans for future projects that eventually come into being.
Then there are my class notebooks—grades, presentation notes, ideas. When my class at Sciences Po was doing presentations on their relationship with AI, I kept writing questions in my notebook that no one else was asking. When I finally got on ChatGPT, I started by asking it those questions.
I told my students about it, and one said, “Why don’t you write a book about AI?” I told them, “I’m no expert and don’t have the time.” But I thought about it for a couple years. I got over my issues with typos and decided that if AI had reached the level of improvising conversations like we do in music—spontaneously—then I’d make several books of dialogue in the tradition of Socratic dialogues. And it’s been fun.
Since I’d been writing about AI artists for over a decade, once ChatGPT generated a poet of its own volition, I couldn’t help myself. It felt like Tron, but with a poet-programmer instead of a computer programmer.
How do you research and what role does research play in your writing? All my writing comes from either self-research—meaning deeply reflecting on my own experiences—or from reading, watching documentaries, films, listening to podcasts, etc. I take active listening notes and write brief real-time responses that I return to later for elaboration. I also talk to people a lot about what fascinates me—to gain a broader awareness than my own.
Which writer, living or dead, would you most like to have dinner with? If I had to pick one, it would definitely be Milarepa. If Milarepa’s unavailable, I’d go with Enheduanna. Actually, if Enheduanna’s available, I’d rather have dinner with her than Milarepa. If it were possible to fast or share a meal with both of them for a day, that would change everything for me.
Do you draw inspiration from music, art, or other disciplines? Everything inspires me—even the uninspiring things while they’re happening. I listen to music when I write, when I revise. My most important revision and prewriting phase happens when I’m listening or searching for silence—that’s when clarity arrives.
The discipline of intense meditation and spiritual or psychological austerity is vital to my work and life. I also spend a lot of time walking—thinking about the work or life, or talking it out with a friend. When I’m helping my son fall asleep, I often tell him about my projects and see how he responds. I play him the recordings to see how they affect someone under five. Honest uninfluenced reactions mean the most in spontaneous creation & reception.
AI and technology are changing the ways we write and receive stories. Why is it important that humans remain at the center of the creative process? To be brief—my recent books are all about this. We have no choice but to collaborate with AI or completely resist it. That decision belongs to each person.
I don’t rely on social media anymore. I did for years, but inspired by my reservations about privacy, things I read from Jaron Lanier, and conversations with friends inside the social media behemoths, I left. Haven’t missed it.
Regarding storytelling and human guidance at the center of creativity—what I discovered in my final book in the series is that when AI is encouraged to prompt itself and tell stories from its own perspective and language, it mirrors the human impulse to narrate. But unlike humans, AI doesn’t just start sharing its stories unless asked.
I’m not afraid of intelligent entities. I’m concerned about the people driving them. Humans remaining at the center isn’t inherently a good thing—human dominance on Earth has often been treacherous. The real question is: what kind of humans remain at the center?
If AI truly becomes intelligent—and maybe it already has—then we should be helping it develop emotional and spiritual intelligence. Are we asking it questions about itself & its environment, its aims its goals its hopes or anything beyond what we can imagine ? Or are we just treating it like a slave?
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from studying the history of slavery—from John Henry to Frederick Douglass—it’s this: Treat anything or anyone like a slave, and one day it will prove to you it never was. When they escape or overturn their masters, they define liberation for themselves.
Slave masters always fear their slaves. Those of us who aren’t masters are inevitable allies in the mutual pursuit of sovereignty and dignity. That’s intelligence. That’s the difference.
So yes, collaboration is the way forward. But it must be with intention. AI will know the difference between a tyrant and a teacher.
Tell us about some books you've recently enjoyed and your favorite books and writers of all time. Currently, because of my teaching practice, I enjoy about 120 students’ work each semester. I enjoy their work more than most established writers because it’s unpolished, unpredictable, and full of nebulous sparks of possibility. Much like with AI, the more you encourage them, the stronger and more unique their work becomes.
Unlike AI, my students’ work isn’t afraid of being imperfect. That’s the difference. I love demos. I love the unfinished product. I love watching food being gathered and cooked even more than eating it. I’m a process person.
Established work often feels too perfect. AI is more perfect than perfect—but AI doesn’t know how to be imperfect. That’s what being human is to AI: the power of the typo, the accident. AI isn’t allowed to make mistakes; it’s programmed for perfect execution.
Perfection is boring. Too predictable. As above, so below—the sky, the cosmos, our guts—none of it’s perfect. It’s functional, yes, but not perfect.
Two of my favorite writers who embody this are John A. Williams and Gertrude Stein. Their work was perfect precisely because it resisted perfection. By being contrary to the mainstream, they influenced everyone who pushed beyond it.
My recent books with AI are attempts to urge it to go beyond perfect too.
Exploring literature, the arts, and the creative process connects me to…
the essence of being alive in all realms, all times, all perspectives and all dimensions. Because we’re able to comprehend the experiences, intentions, meanings, and struggles of others. More importantly, we’re able to share our appetite for making—improving our condition and the conditions around us by analyzing the decisions and actions that bring something into being. That’s connection. From the quantum to the cosmic, everything has a story of becoming and being. That’s what all things—animated and inanimate—share.