(If you’d prefer to enjoy an 11-minute video version of this essay on The Poetry Vessel YouTube Channel, tap here.)

Anthropic, the near-$1 trillion-valued company behind the AI Claude, has been using hydraulic cutting machines to slice the spines off books before using a scanner to digitize their pages in their secret “Project Panama”. They did this to “train” their AI models.

An internal Anthropic document, obtained by the Washington Post, explicitly stated “we don’t want it to be known that we are working on this.” It’s okay though — because after the cut they recycled the books!

So here’s my response as a book lover and poet for over two decades.

If you’re new here, I’m Nathan Hassall, Malibu Poet Laureate Emeritus and practicing poet for over twenty years. This is the Poetry Vessel, where we discuss books, the poet’s life, and tips on how to write poetry. Subscribe to this Substack and join 1000s of poetry lovers on our general mailing list by entering your email below.

My argument is this: Books, especially good, beautiful books, have a soul. Bear with me.

I think it’s fitting that we use the term “spine” (a metonymy, where we use a body part to metaphorically describe something that isn’t a body part) — so integral to protecting the nervous system and allowing us movement and flexibility — to describe the part of a book that holds it all together. It’s also no coincidence that we call people who are afraid to stand up for what they believe in — or those who conceal from the public what’s going on behind the scenes of giant tech companies that they clearly know is wrong — spineless.

When I picture a book, especially a rare book, going through this mutilation process, I feel my own body being sliced: like I’m losing my arms and ears. For what? So my consciousness — a huge part of me — can be decontexualized from the body, to be swallowed by some unregulated technology that may or may not be the end of us all? Then what, skin and bone recycled?

Carelessly destroying a book is akin to destroying a body. A book is a body, and it is also a talisman, a magical object, the toil and breath of an enchanted thing; and to inflict this sort of injury to it is a sacrilegious assault. You are destroying, in a very real sense, an essence by destroying a book; especially a rare book. If you’re skeptical, picture doing this to a Bible. Or a one-of-a-kind, medieval alchemy manuscript. Or that one well-loved and tattered book you cherish from childhood.

I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you that we make books from paper. But paper, too, is more than itself; it comes from cutting down our atmospheric allies in trees, and it allows us a litany of riches, so that we may preserve and transmit poetry, stories, culture, spiritual realizations, information, knowledge, wisdom — all proof of our being here — on them.

Of course, not all books are worth the paper they’re printed on: charlatans, exploiters, deceivers—they write books too. But I still wouldn’t grant a company—with capital so extensive that most individual book collectors—who would actually take care of special books, stroke them, read them, and eventually, through gift, sale, or death, pass them on with a mix of love and reluctance, wanting to know they were going to a good home—wouldn’t be able to compete.

Swiss psychologist Carl Jung said a good book shows the visible mental struggles of an author. They often result — if we’re not just asking AI to “generate” one for us — after years of toil: reading, thinking, writing, editing, reading, thinking, writing, editing, editing, editing, until eventually it is pushed out to publications and printers, where an author at some stage will find themselves disappointed at some of the book’s lack. People buy them, read them, drop them, and scribble on them (I never do this, but I do like reading the uniqueness of having a book with someone else’s notes on it, but I digress). People also take books to distant lands on trains and planes, make notes from them, discuss them at book clubs, and place them in their houses as aesthetic objects (we have a giant copy of Jung’s Red Book under our glass coffee table, which we flick to various art pieces throughout the months).

As an old alchemy saying goes, Liber librum aperit—one book opens another. So, by that logic, a destroyed book destroys the possibility of another. The slicing is a closing.

One aspect of bookmaking is about beauty, and another is about violence. It is in these split energies where the medium is allied to the message, like a specific tree that lives at a specific altitude, in a specific time, with a specific context, of which some are cut down. We ink our way onto tree-death, after all.

And we use these trees to house words. And words are magic—they climb and sever old concepts in our heads — sometimes for better, sometimes for ill (it’s on us as individuals to be discerning readers after all). Metaphors change us. And language worms in and gnaws, lights up the skull, throws shadows against bone.

So when I learned that Anthropic has been buying up millions of books — including rare books — and then proceeded to industrially slice them apart, swallow their information, and recycle them afterward, I was, and still am, quite sickened.

But I am not surprised.

I expect anti-environmental, anti-intellectual, anti-human, anti-life nihilism dressed up as “inevitable progress” to continue to take place. And I’m not speaking as a Luddite or someone who is blanketly against AI, because I’m not. I think there’s tremendous value potential in having what is essentially a library — so much of human knowledge — capable of producing infinite synthesis in our pockets. But like this? To ravage communities, water supplies, books and more with giant data systems integrated with some of the most diabolical surveillance and military technologies in existence? It’s not hard to be against this, but we live in a culture of “do-what-you-feel-like” without a genuine reckoning with moral consequences because, well, we feel like it.

I think any person — book lover or not — should be against the destruction of art and culture, and against the destroying, looting, and burning of books, no matter the supposed utility of doing so.

I’m not alone in this, of course. When I told my six-year-old niece about this, she opened her mouth wide and said, “But books are really important. They could be about hospitals.” And, upon a brief conversation with my wife Rachael at the breakfast table, she said, “It’s like someone buying the Mona Lisa and shredding it for data” — too right.

Plus, I have a friend in Gabriel McCaughry, who is the CEO of Anathema Publishing, a company that treats books as the special objects they are, that transmit information, spiritual ideas and technologies, and artistry across time and space through their being as magically charged objects. Knowing how much care goes into each of Anathema’s books, cover to format, information to art, and the fact that he pays so much out of pocket for a project way bigger than himself, is admirable and places books on the throne of human achievement (alongside other artistic, mathematical, scientific, poetic, and philosophical insights) where they belong. I find it hard to fathom destroying one of these things intentionally. Doing so by accident, to me, would feel as bad as stepping onto a snail shell on a path at night. But then again, people do far worse to humans and animals, for not much more than sadistic pleasure, so colour me unsurprised. '

Which brings me to another consideration.

The philosopher and phenomenologist Martin Heidegger conceptualized this idea in athleia, which translates to unconcealment. He believed that things have their own essence that presents itself should we let—a la Husserl’s lines—things be things: what they are to consciousness, not what we have already decided them to be. If we allow the individual book to be a book, if we can look at it with the eye of a child encountering this strange thing, free of our preconceptions [to bracket, as Husserl would say], what does it become in the present? And upon doing this, could we change our relationship with that book, and other books, by honoring the weirdness that they are, and how different they are when they are on the shelf unread, or in our hands, folding page after page as our eyes encounter text and we hallucinate words by another person without them being present? Will doing this sort of work help us care for books and others, including the human and non-human living world?

So with this in mind, I’ll do a little descriptive/phenomenological exercise to see if it can elevate my relationship to a particular book. That book is A Defence of Poesie (pictured below) by Sir Phillip Sidney, edited by Professor Henry Morley, a Cassell’s National Library edition, which I read recently.

I’ll let you be the judge of the results.

A Phenomenological Rendering of A Defense

Smooth with occasional roughness to fingertips. Luminous text inside a black rectangle, elevating thunder gold, shoulder-to-shoulder alphabet, compelling the eye to flit over flick and curve. Shapes cut, leafed, catching light from behind. Small enough to grasp in my left hand, though it presents as heft, info-dense. My eyes trace borders, flowers, leaves, circles as it revolves and re-shapes, expands and contracts like a headache, or a breathing lung. Smells like it has been for a while, an alluring wisp of was-ness, musty, an offense in some senses that brings its own strange, inedible delight. Inside is brown, edges slightly ruffled, the object’s back-end loosely wrapped and frayed at the bottom, exposing white tendrils to stroke with the index finger.

I pick up and twist it. Every angle, a new experience, a new pleasure for the eye. Not heavy, so I balance its middle upon my thumb, tiny baby caterpillar, see-sawing until balance is found. I place it down onto its back, onto a smooth surface, where it may sleep.

Now, I’d like to offer you a prompt. Take a single book and look at it from lots of angles, touch it, smell it, tap it and listen to it, but bracket your idea of it as a book. That means, try to look at it anew, with fresh senses, and describe how it presents to consciousness without using the usual language you’d use for a book. Perhaps, ask it: what are you? And for further reflection, what are you trying to tell me?

Listen to what it says back, then write it down.

Once you’re done, try to feel what the object would feel like if a guillotine hung over its spine.

Then tell it not to worry—the recycler will be here soon.

Sources/Further Reading

Anathema Publishing Ltd. (n.d.). Anathema Publishing. Retrieved August 3, 2026, from https://www.anathemapublishing.com/

Heidegger, M. (2008). Being and Time (J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson, Trans.). HarperPerennial Modern Thought. (Original work published 1927)

Husserl, E. (2001). Logical Investigations (J. N. Findlay, Trans.; D. Moran, Ed.; Vol. 1). Routledge. (Original work published 1900)

Nitasha Tiku, Gerrit De Vynck, & Will Oremus. (2026, January 27). Anthropic 'destructively' scanned millions of books to build Claude. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/01/27/anthropic-ai-scan-destroy-books/

Sidney, P. (1891). A Defence of Poesie and Poems (H. Morley, Ed.). Cassell & Company. (Original work published 1595)

“This is the first poem I’ve ever written,” a 90-year-old male war veteran said to the small, 20-person-strong room of poets in Bluff’s Park, Malibu, after offering to share his just-penned work. The paper rattled in his hands as he brought it closer to his face.

Through a window, the ocean is visible across grassy plains where kids are playing football (the one with the spherical ball we English folk refer to) flanked by California Live Oak, Sycamore, and Redbud trees. Inside, under the drone of an extractor fan, we had gathered in this room as we had been, month-on-month.

The man focused through his thin-framed glasses onto the page, inhaled a shaky breath through his nose, and began to recite his poem. As he did, the room shifted. Even the world beyond felt like it held its breath, awaiting the birth of a new expression.

When he finished, applause filled the room. Never have I seen a smile spread so wide. “I didn’t know that was in me,” he said.

“And now it’s in us,” I responded, then thanked him for sharing.

This was a moment from The Ripple Effect workshop, a monthly workshop writing series I held in Malibu during my time as Poet Laureate.

My Goal for the Workshop

My goal for this workshop was to help us become more aware about how we affect each other — the ripple — and how the energy we pour out enters another and vice versa, focusing on writing prompts and soft skills so we could both write new poems and learn techniques to improve them.

I focused on how writing and sharing poems in the community is an intentional way to think about our “ripples” and how they affect the class and continue to have aftereffects once the class ends.

So touched by being present for the veteran’s first poem, I realized that he confirmed something I’ve said to others who have expressed an interest in starting to write or read poetry: “It’s never too late.” Only now, I wasn’t abstracting a belief; I had a palpable example.

No matter if you’ve never written a poem before or if you’re a daily writer, poetry is always something you can cultivate. Poetry — even if written privately — is communal as soon as it is read or heard by someone else. Its living flesh is constructed with language — itself a technology of communication — after all. And, the best poems end up living within us and changing us, sometimes over the course of our whole lives.

Experiences like this are one of the reasons why I continued hosting poetry writing workshops after my laureateship ended, through the company I started during my tenure, The Poetry Vessel. One of the goals of The Poetry Vessel is to help cultivate people’s unique poetic voices by inspiring them to write and providing educational resources to help them express themselves more effectively.

With this in mind, The Poetry Vessel has opened up its first-ever online poetry workshop, Poetry as Transformation, which I’ll be hosting. This is a 2-hour, once-a-week, 4-week workshop where the goal is to write poetry that is transformative — that helps give us a new perspective, surprises and changes us, and — perhaps most importantly — dares us to write something we’ve never written before.

Each week, we focus on a unique theme, starting with exploring and writing poems about our inner shadows, then moving on to writing poems about dreams, nature and ecological poetry and finally culminating in spiritually minded poems. I’ve purposely used this order to help us move from self to other, and then to dissolution: synthesizing self and other into one.

In my workshops, I believe in setting ritual contexts to help us get into flow. Therefore, I will open each class with a unique, guided meditation I wrote to start the class: exercises will open up your imagination.

We will then read and discuss some contemporary/classic poems, and work with prompts to write in new ways, bringing out words we didn’t even know we had. We will enter a collective flow state, so profoundly poetic expressions can emerge from us. The goal is to write 2-3 poems per workshop class for the four weeks.

The veteran wasn’t the only person who came to the workshop over and over—there are 100s of stories I could tell about students I’ve had, and about times when I have been a student in other people’s classes. But all I know is that the man who wrote his first poem in the class with me didn’t write his last on the same day. With or without classes, I know he has continued to write.

Is Poetry as Transformation for you? Here’s a snippet of what some others have said about my workshops:

Poetry as Transformation Workshop Details

If you feel called to join this workshop but cost is a barrier, or if you have any questions, please reach out to info[at]thepoetryvessel[dot]com.

Sign up to the workshop and learn more about full scheduling here.

I can’t wait to write with you.

Best always,

Nathan Hassall
Founder of The Poetry Vessel
Malibu Poet Laureate ‘23-‘25

This interaction happened more than once. And, being a young teenager, the advice annoyed me. If I were bored, how could a boring activity solve it? (Strangely, I did enjoy reading during childhood and then again in my later teens up until now, but there was a gap.)

It was only recently that I remembered this advice and appreciated its wisdom.

Before I go further, let me say: feeling bored, and tolerating boredom, is good. If you feel bored for long enough, without any irritable reaching for your smartphone, your brain can come up with a miraculous solution (all by itself!).

This solution needn’t involve reading. But being bored is an opportunity to do something satisfying. Something that, when you lie down at the end of the day, you can think, “I’m glad I did that.”

There are lots of things you can do. You could read a book, but you could also commit a speech to memory, call a friend, spend time with family, or write a poem. Or, you could get your hands dirty and do some gardening, paint, walk your dog, or fix that loose door hinge in your house that you’ve been telling yourself to fix for six months, which will take you about 30 seconds.

Rather than wait for something to happen to you, do something.

At the risk of hammering this point home, “do” is the operative word here. I was bored before I started writing this article, and I’m not bored now that I’m writing it because the tap is on, and the words are flowing.

So, rather than grasping for your phone and hoping Pan’s tech-bro brother, the Great God Algorithm, finds the right video to slather your bored brain in numbing balm, take a breath. Ask, what do I actually want to do? Then wait for an answer.

I’m glad I didn’t grow up with a smartphone. Even though I probably could have done without the amount of time I put into video games, once I got up and left the house, there wasn’t anything except outside. I could explore the woods and fields, walk to town, or stand outside shops, asking adult strangers to take my newspaper-delivery money and buy me a pack of cigarettes (okay, not all my nostalgia is positive). I used to use coins or dial 0800-REVERSE from a payphone to call home if I needed to tell my parents what time I’d be back. Details in the world were crisper. Fields were greener because I actually looked at them. Birdsong and car engines registered because I actually listened to them.

But this was the beforetime. When I got bored, I would do something tangible about it. Now, we treat boredom as so intolerable that we’d prefer to be anesthetized by social media, or the instant gratification of asking AI an opinion on something, knowing that, at some point, it’ll do its kiss-arse routine and say, “You’re absolutely right!”

Don’t get me wrong—a part of me loves social media. I have a YouTube channel (The Poetry Vessel with Nathan Hassall) with 8.5k subscribers, where I share poetry education videos and podcasts. I post on Facebook and Instagram. For all social media’s problems, data scraping and spying are two obvious ones—social media has enabled so many things, not least of which is keeping up with and making new friends, many of them poets. I’ve read their poems. I’ve taken their poetry workshops, hired editors, found mentors, given mentorship, bought and read their books and recommended books, been challenged by them, delighted in their successes and consoled them in their losses, shared my own, and had lengthy, thoughtful, and sometimes heated debates, all in this interconnected web. Of course, I’ve also used social media to doomscroll, or checked it too many times after posting to see if I have had any interaction on something I thought worth sharing. I’ve used it to alleviate boredom, and often—though not always—that fails. I am mildly entertained, and time passes, but boredom still lingers.

Boredom is a feeling our tech-driven culture has tried to solve, like it’s something we shouldn’t experience. And it has done so through offerings of things that aren’t particularly resonant or transcendent, but mildly intoxicating—like through short-form entertainment, AKA digital fast food, quick dopamine hits of mild satisfaction that make time flow by with very little to show for it.

We’ve treated boredom as something we shouldn’t feel, so we reach for the first thing that most easily rids us of the feeling. The thing about boredom is that it is a feeling that’s often a precursor. Surely there’s something evolutionarily advantageous to the feeling; to solve the boredom, you have to act. You have to do something.

If all else fails, read a book.

*

Thank you for reading my first Substack post. I have recently opened my workshop, Poetry as Transformation, which brings together all I’ve learned over 18+ years as a poet and educator, and my 2 years as Malibu Poet Laureate (2023-2025).

Writing as Transformation is an online, live generative writing workshop taking place over 4 weeks in May. Max 12 participants. If you’re interested in learning more, tap here.

I’ll see you next time.

Nathan Hassall

Malibu Poet Laureate ’23-‘25
Founder of The Poetry Vessel