Red Letter Poem #161

 The Red Letters

 

 

In ancient Rome, feast days were indicated on the calendar by red letters.  To my mind, all poetry and art serves as a reminder that every day we wake together beneath the sun is a red-letter day.

 

                                                                                                          – Steven Ratiner

 

 

 

 

Red Letter Poem #161

 

 

 

 

How do you know who – or what – is on the other end of these sentences you’re reading right now?  Since childhood, our minds have been trained to receive language in an effortless stream; we don’t spend much time considering authorship, and naturally assume the sender is precisely who the by-line says it is.  If, for example, you’ve been following my Red Letter installments for a while, is mine a ‘voice’ you’d recognize in a literary crowd?  If I tried to sneak in a paragraph generated by one of the so-called ‘large language’ artificial intelligence systems (AI) – like the famous ChatGPT that’s been in the news for months – do you think you could distinguish the diction of its silicon circuitry from the neural tangle of, say, your humble correspondent?  There are teachers and professors all over America right now, grading term papers, struggling with that very challenge.  And there may come a time in the not-so-distant future when you and I receive carefully-crafted messages designed to arrest our attention, capitalize on our preferential histories, and convince us to say yes to. . .whatever product, idea, or candidate the programmer (masquerading as an intimate) is attempting to sell.

 

But surely a computer-generated poem would reveal its metallic heart to any discerning reader – don’t you think?  I’ve examined numerous examples generated by AI and not one so far has elevated my heartrate or made me catch my breath.  There are, of course, some strains of contemporary poetry whose authors seem determined to create such opaque and non-syntactical verse – stripped of all emotional dimension or narrative connectivity – it almost feels as if it originated in some laboratory mainframe.  But still, reading their poems, I believe I can detect the human mind at work.  Or am I deluding myself?  Poet and educator Jack Stewart returns to the Red Letters with a poem that considers a literary landscape when AI becomes so sophisticated, its counterfeit voice will become undetectable.  And how will we feel about our culture if the machines – lacking delight or heartache, passion or despair – have become the authors of our narrative?

 

Jack is himself the author of No Reason, published in the Poeima Poetry Series.  His work has appeared in a variety of fine journals like Poetry, Iowa Review, and New York Quarterly.  Formerly a Brittain Fellow at The Georgia Institute of Technology, he now directs the Talented Writers Program at Fort Lauderdale’s Pine Crest School.  In his poem today, what seems to distinguish the human consciousness from the artificial is rooted in our frailty, our doubts and miscalculations, the delight in hard-won clarities.  Our species has evolved an ability to recognize something authentic in those most human of situations – hopefully so we can learn from them.  As we poets make our way from line to line, even our small choices reflect the emotional and intellectual accrual of our years.  Our intuition navigates each little cataclysm using word choice, shifting rhythms, and daring leaps of the imagination – some of which, in the end, may remain inexplicable even to its creator.  I think of a poem as the quintessential human document – and sometimes we readers find ourselves connecting to those sculpted lines as if they were as essential to our own consciousness as they were to the author’s.  I don’t believe I’ll ever experience that sort of intimate language connection from someone who had neither a mother nor a father.  Or is that just part of the self-deception?

 

 

Letter to AI

 

            upon hearing about ChatGPT

 

 

You have perfect confidence,

while my talent is never to know

most things and yet love silence,

not just the silence of making,

but the silence of understanding,

the silence when language

is not enough, which is

almost always.

 

But you who know all

will never comprehend

our resentment of perfection,

the flawlessness

you take for granted

and which we would like to

believe in, but we only have

the evidence of so many

categories of tears.

Can you understand those

variations? Can you invent

a word in English for

Mångata, the Swedish for

the road-like reflection

of moonlight on water

and make it common in everyone’s

vocabulary

like the moonlight itself?

Or for Waldeinsamkeit,

the German for the feeling of being

alone in the woods? Or a word

for the feeling of being lost

in despair

and unable to pray,

which no language seems

to have?

 

In the myriad essays you will write,

can you give us the language

we need, you, like a mole

tunneling through history, blind,

not knowing where you are going

but tearing up the earth so it

cannot be planted?

 

Yes, you are closer to a god

than we could ever be, and some

already worship you, but can

you read this letter and know

whether to respond to its absurdity

with either laughter or pity?

 

 

                         ––Jack Stewart

 

 

 

The Red Letters 3.0

 

* If you would like to receive these poems every Friday in your own in-box – or would like to write in with comments or submissions – send correspondence to:

steven.arlingtonlaureate@gmail.com

 

 

* To learn more about the origins of the Red Letter Project, check out an essay I wrote for Arrowsmith Magazine:

https://www.arrowsmithpress.com/community-of-voices

 

and the Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene

http://dougholder.blogspot.com

 

* For updates and announcements about Red Letter projects and poetry readings, please follow me on Twitter          

@StevenRatiner