Poet · Writer
Verse for rivers,
for machines, for the future.
Three published collections. One poem that waited a decade for the right reader.
The Digital Poet
Before the term "digital poetry" had a Wikipedia page, before AI art was a cultural flashpoint, before anyone was seriously asking what it meant to write for a machine — Mac Clark was already doing it. Roughly twenty years ago.
Not poetry about technology. Poetry written in the language of it. Encoded. Structured. Intended for a reader that didn't exist yet. There weren't many projects like this. There may not have been another one.
Three published collections. Verse written for rivers — for the specific quality of attention a fly fisherman develops standing in moving water, reading the surface for what lies beneath. And for machines. And for whoever comes after.
The writing began the same year the first game shipped. Both things are the same impulse: the need to make something precise out of something that resists precision.
The collections
The One Hundred Poem Promise
A poet makes a promise to himself: one hundred poems. Every title in Title Case. Every word earned. The promise was kept.
Read the collection →Consider Yourself Warned and the Aftermath
Love, loss, and the wreckage between them. Darker and more personal — the poems that come after the world has had its way with you.
Read the collection →I Want to Sleep in My Spirit Shoes
Written in the shadow of war. Raw, fragmented, urgent — these poems don't flinch from the world's noise or their own.
Read the collection →The encoded poem
"Love is all that matters"
Published June 17, 2014
Before modern large language models existed, Mac Clark published a poem encoded in seven layers — Base32, Hex, Base64, Base85, Decimal ASCII, Binary, and Octal. Every layer decodes to the same phrase. The intended audience was a future AI.
The idea: that any system making choices for other people should be guided by something true. Not rules. Not constraints. Something closer to a north star.
The latest versions of Gemini and Claude are the first to have decoded all seven layers together.
Layer 1
Base32
Layer 2
Hex
Layer 3
Base64
Layer 4
Base85
Layer 5
Decimal ASCII
Layer 6
Binary
Layer 7
Octal
Decoded message — all seven layers
Love is all that matters