This is the second installment in a three-part series Authors Talk by Mackenzie Polonyi.
Transcript:
Welcome to the second part of my series. I will talk now about magánhangzók, or vowels.
In Post-Volcanic Folk Tales, I sculpt portals from vowels, particularly A, which occurs thrice in my grandmother’s first name, and O, which is a poetic Apostrophe; a figure or integer of address.
In her Literary Hub interview with Michael Prior, entitled ‘I Trust Nothing But Music,’ Valzhyna Mort writes of apostrophe: ‘There is an intense connection between the experience of dislocation and apostrophe. It’s an address at a safe distance. Unlike other forms of address, apostrophe talks to somebody or something but doesn’t really want to receive an answer, at least not an answer made of words.’
Michael Prior writes: ‘Apostrophe is closely related to prayer – and can be form of consolation – active, a way to speak to and of people and places lost.’
In Hungarian language, O has four variations (including the original), differing by diacritical markings: O, Ó, Ö, Ő.
For me, my mother-language’s four O’s are cardinal directions or the absence of. They are generations of feathering throats. All together, they form a compass made from a string quartet of circular vowels (soundholes of resonance chambers) but the compass is broken. A weather vane, but the weather vane is broken. An answer made of words, there is no such thing.
I write, for example, throughout Post-Volcanic Folk Tales:
‘O umbilical chord’
‘O stone ruins cob-webbing my sternum,
O sacral orchards erupting pedunculate oak,
O fossa echoic with ubiquitous dog-song’
‘O sunflower’
‘O sheaves of wheat O wetland reeds’
‘O glucose of oak’
‘O cipher O stuck note’
‘O blood-whisperings’
‘O her’
I reach out for, towards: anatomy, landscape, place, environment, rural village, architectonics, beloveds, sugar of the blood, arterial-venous-capillary plaits of the circulatory system, ecological music. I cast my telluric prayers. I endeavor to console. But to console what or whom? My grandmother? Her many selves, shadows, hackled-angels, wounds? To console land we are hurting
‘a pikeperch skeleton haunting a poisoned river,
punishing gold miners with temporary gills,
swished its hour hand tail,’
land I love? To console my mother? Myself? Eldest or only daughters of diaspora, tasked with archiving, preservation of tongue, scriptotherapy, caretaking, cycle-breaking? The libraries of wolf-birds we are? I reach out for the only language left after dementia took unyielding insurmountable hold of my house: music.
O, an object, is a mirror, a window, a keyhole. An eye, a mouth, a navel, a grape, a gate, a star, a moon, a sun, a whole note, a birth canal. O is entrance, exit, crater or vent of volcano. The diacritical markings: antennae, beaks, wings, knitting pins, binary star systems, ash clouds, umbilical cords, cuspid teeth.
A is another portal-vowel. Arrow, roost or nest, fang, bull or ox, sky-ladder, soil-ladder. A allows for my hopping from time to time to time, place to place to place, poem to poem to poem. Using the trinity of A’s in my grandmother’s name, each A being a compartment for pigeon nests or funerary urns, I portal into: A volcaniclastic lake formed in an abandoned millstone quarry (or the absence of it), a sessile oak forest from which botrytized wine casks are made of (or the absence of it), a subcarpathian village orchestrating annual apricot fiestas (or absence of it).
I write recurrently about what I call an ‘inverted negative surface.’ Inverted is inside out, reversed, transposed, retrograde, backwards, turned back. According to The Oxford English Dictionary, negative is: absence, without, an absolute lack of something. In arithmetic, subtracted from or a quantity less than zero, denoting a direction of decrease or reversal; in photography, light and shade reversed from original; in physics (like a magnet), an electric charge carried by electrons, beckoning a positive charge (who or what am I calling upon and who or what is calling upon me?); in astrology, earth or water, passive in nature: soil and river.
Reading ‘inverted negative surface,’ one may initially understand that the surface is hyper-nonexistent, upturned, under, but in arithmetical operations (multiplication), two negatives make a positive, and in English grammatical operations, double negatives reveal an opposite meaning. Then, a surface (according to my own syntactic-semantic ‘equation’) that is both real and not real, material and immaterial, above and below, earth and sky. A and O are portals into amalgamated mythical realities. The grammatical lack of a comma between inverted and negative allows for multiple readings, multiple meanings.
In her Catapult essay, entitled Writing Letters To Mao, Jennifer S. Cheng questions: What does it mean to experience a history of trauma and blood in ephemeralities, in residue?
‘Knowledge in an immigrant household,’ she writes, ‘comes in tides that approach and recede.’ ‘There are always gaps and missing ghosts.’ ‘All the fear and protection and silence and love comes so mixed together, it would be a falsehood to separate them.’ For the child of an immigrant (or one raised like the child of an immigrant), ‘history,’ Jennifer writes, is ‘blurry, leaky, vague,’ a ‘specter.’ Involved are ‘complicated feelings of anger, curiosity, tenderness, intimacy.’ ‘There is so much I did not know,’ Jennifer continues, ‘and even if I asked questions, I never received a straightforward or comprehensive answer.’ ‘At some point, I decided that either my parents didn’t know much of their family narratives––a lineage misplaced among the turbulence––or they didn’t have the language, linguistically or emotionally, to communicate with me about it. As for so many children of immigrants, their lives came to me in little fragments and echoes that I collected in my palm like rainwater.’ I experienced what Jennifer has articulated here deeply, fully, precisely. The cupped palms of A. The bucket of O. Such rainwater-like fragments often require supplementary information. For a refugee with dementia, because of trauma, imperfections and limitations of memory, disease, displacement or dislocation, linguistic barriers, silence, archival holes, storytelling becomes tattered, honeycombed, frayed.
In my experience, for one raised like the child of a refugee, a true narrative, then, is only made truer, fleshier, by certain mythic or imaginative additions. The story of my relationship to my mother’s mother-country cannot be told truly without mythical inclusion, for along with research, how else can I fill the gaps hacked by shame, fear, borders, exile, violence, distance, and time? Home is real, a shape on a map, it has coordinates, it has airports and train stations, it has buses and trams, people live there, my family lives there, I have gone there. But, for me personally, home can also only be touched in my grandmother’s stories of it when I was a child. So, intricately, it is also a far-far-away. How does a daughter of diaspora who loves her language, land, gastronomic traditions, folk embroidery, folk music, thermal spa culture, and wine-growing culture, but is categorically ashamed of, revolted by, and in opposition to her home country’s political reality, its dictatorial, kleptocratic, propagandistic prime minister wielding misogynistic, homophobic, racist, anti-immigration rhetoric reconcile her longing for home while necessarily condemning violent political materialities (painfully similar to those within my birth country) of home itself?
Home is neither a matter of geography, nor graveyards; neither a matter of nation, nor nostalgia; neither a matter of tickets, nor time zones. It is more fabled, more relational, more private, more ineffable. I cannot name it myself, but I do get whiffs, whispers, glimmers of it: dirt vibrations, interoceptive and exteroceptive insight, uterine ambient nose, oven-warm candlelit magic of traditions. A is the only aircraft that can reach it (a dragon), O is the only worm-like phantom train.
Congratulations to After Dinner Conversation literary magazine on the recent publication of their first themed short story collection! Technology Ethics is part of a series of nine themed editions the magazine is releasing throughout 2024.
The dawn of AI, transhumanism, and robotics, will rise just like the sun, inexorably, and we are now struggling to imagine that future, to understand what it might mean for humanity when/if something else takes the wheel. There is no doubt now that AI will surpass our abilities in many areas: radiological analysis, data entry, medical diagnosis, paralegal research, and the list expands daily, as does the worry surrounding the disruption to our jobs, and to our lives.
This issue of ADC speaks to the growing unease with respect to our loss of control and our involuntary delegation of decision-making to technology. This powerful and accelerating wave will be transformative.
Deborah Serra – Technology Ethics Edition Editor
You can purchase the Technology Ethics collection on Amazon. Their next collection, Crimes and Punishments is available for preorder and will be released on February 21!
This collection has already received well-deserved praise:
“These collections can offer a spine for such courses, or the individual stories could be added to a course as illustrative material to stimulate discussion; outside of educational contexts, they work nicely to stimulate conversation in families, elder hostels, youth clubs, or book groups.”
Luc Bovens, PhD – Philosophy Professor, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
After Dinner Conversation is an independent, nonprofit, literary magazine that focuses on short story fiction that encourages philosophical and ethical discussions with friends, family, and students. Each story comes with five suggested discussion questions. You can discover more on their website and social media: fxi.
Superstition Review is the online literary magazine produced by creative writing and web design students at Arizona State University. Founded in 2008, the mission of the journal is to promote contemporary art and literature by providing a free, easy-to-navigate, high quality online publication that features work by established and emerging artists and authors from all over the world. We publish two issues a year with art, fiction, interviews, nonfiction, and poetry. We also enjoy honoring all members of our Superstition Review family by maintaining a strong year-round community of editors, submitters, contributors, and readers on our blog and social networks.
Trainees
Trainees will register for a 3 credit-hour ENG 394 course. The course will offer a study of the field of literary magazines.
Upon successful completion of ENG 394, trainees will enroll in ENG 484 and become active interns with the magazine.
All work is done completely online.
We welcome interns from all fields.
Applications are accepted on a rolling basis.
Internships are now available for ASU Online students and graduate students.
What Interns Say:
“This class has been a huge eye-opener for me and I feel so lucky to have had the opportunity to work in the publishing and editing industry before graduating.”
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“I feel I got a great internship experience that will help me post graduation.”
This month Superstition Review is presenting a three part Authors Talk by Mackenzie Polonyi.
Below is the audio file for her author talk and under that is the transcript.
Transcript:
Thank you for being with me here, for your intentional listening. My name is Mackenzie Polonyi, I am the author of Post-Volcanic Folk Tales, my debut poetry collection, which was a winner of The National Poetry Series 2023 and is under contract for publication with Akashic Books, 2024. In my three part series, I will be talking about objects and their possibilities, particularly notable objects from my forthcoming book: pigeons, vowels, and teeth.
In Laura van den Berg’s craft essay in Craft Literary, entitled Object Lessons: An Exploration, Laura writes first about orienting details (her examples: ‘Is a character inside or outside? Is it sunny or raining?’ They ‘ground readers’ and establish scene) and granular details (According to Laura, they are ‘hyper-specific, hyper-vivid.’ They ‘hold layers of time and meaning … and resonance,’ they ‘introduce questions and dimensions,’ and they ‘startle and destabilize’). The latter has the potential to develop or metamorpihize into an object. Here is Laura’s accumulative definition of an object; inter-knitting her own thoughts, theories, and conceptualizations about the presence, purpose, promise, power, and aboutness of objects along with those of Italo Calvino, Virginia Woolf, Charles Baxter, and Alexander Chee:
An object has the power to shift, deepen, and even reshape moments; it is charged with a special force and becomes like the pole of a magnetic, a knot in the network of invisible relationships; it takes on a luminous halo; it contains worlds, troubled and fractured histories, unanswerable mysteries, forcefields of thought and feeling; it communicates the matter that exists beyond the limits of language; it is a mirror and a window and a refraction all at once, it extends both keys and questions, at once deepening and further unsettling our understanding of characters and their inner worlds; it evokes shaping forces, both known and unknown, visible and invisible.
Now, while Laura applies her accumulative definition of an object directly to the craft of fiction, it is also pertinent to the craft of poetry.
Today, in the first part of my series, I will talk about galambok, or pigeons.
In a poem called ‘The Shoe Maker’s Daughter’ from my forthcoming book, I write about how my grandmother, who suffered for years from dementia, would get vacuumed back into German-occupied and Soviet-occupied Hungary in dreams, reliving fragmented traumatic occurrences. Her dreamscape and my dreamscape coagulate or clot together and I try sending her warnings (of sexual violence and other psychological injuries and thieveries) by way of lily-of-the-valley, pollen, nectar, and pigeon. All are granular details, but only the pigeon materializes recurrently (enigmatic then epiphanic then enigmatic again) in ‘The Shoe Maker’s Daughter’ and throughout Post-Volcanic Folk Tales. I write:
‘My dream ripens like an angel-
trumpet into a prehistoric forest where her ubiquitous
nocturnal pings are lightning splitting deciduous beech.
sucking bone-marrow from earth-built homes, ectoparasitic.
Kleptoparasitic––swarming willowing villages.
Rose-knobbed sugar bowls, jam pots, sauce boats, stale bread, spoiled
meat, women’s shucked bodies now belonged
to hives of field-grey then red soldiers.’
I provide context for my reader; showing my reader a woman’s reality in an occupied country, under authority of a hostile military threat. Later, I write:
‘She zeroes in on a distant
iridescent pigeon. Her private focal point
for survival. My failed holographic mail.’
and
‘She vomits
a stiff pigeon foot gripping a pinwheel bouquet of bile-wrinkled letters.’
What is the ‘special force’ of the pigeon, what is the ‘luminous halo’? What troubled and fractured histories, unanswerable mysteries, forcefields of thought and feeling does it contain? What keys and questions does it extend?
A mirror: A grand-daughter must stomach and reconcile the fact that she could not have protected, rescued, or safe-kept her grandmother; furthermore, she is a powerless presence still in her grandmother’s nightmares.
A window: In their present together, in day-scape, in belatedness, what are alternative spells, gestures, or measures of protection, rescue, safekeeping, and reverse-mothering?
A refraction: Perhaps healing is not in having had an impossible, inverted, retrograde alphabet of warning. (I am not prescient omniscient.) Perhaps healing, instead, is in helping a grandmother (from a generation of silence) tend to and find a language for a physical-psychical wound of the past in the future rather than wishing for its very prevention in the frst place. How is a pigeon a multidirectional ‘reaching’?
The vomiting is representative of the impossibility of receiving, internalizing, digesting the heraldic pigeon and all of the portentous correspondences from the future it gripped stiff in its foot. The bile is the immediate indigestion of it. My grandmother, in the poem’s many ‘heres,’ is empty-stomached; unknowing, uninformed. The sodden, warped, unreadable letters, however, are also simultaneously of her own past making. What words was she desperate to cast like stones into the future? How is the act of saying interrupted? Some questions, extended: A carrier pigeon generally summons up suggestions of arrival and departure, delivery, homecoming, but here, delivery and homecoming are non-existent, they are ‘nevers.’ There is a sense of deadendness. What can be said about direction? What can be said about a refugee’s sense of home; her rejection of home’s perceived rigid one-dimensionality? Her orientation, her balance, her splintered compass? Or that of the child of a refugee, or one raised like the child of a refugee? What do longing and returning mean? Along with such complications and complexities involved in weather-vaning home, trauma, additionally, often annihilates articulation. Is trauma-facing dialogue between grand-daughter and grandmother––especially tacking on the interpersonal or intersubjective distances notched by dementia––only possible then in a liminal subconscious dream state, in other words, a poem?
Here area few lines throughout Post-Volcanic Folk Tales in which pigeons manifest again:
‘Whenever I opened my blood-sucking beak,
you regurgitated homesick pigeon
milk like a tonic.’
‘Iridescent pigeons nest like nonsensical sentences in my
They cannot evoke a poet’s self, but they can sometimes come up with useful lines.
Like many writers and teachers, I feel the gathering threat of machine-written literature. In the old days of computers, there used to be a saying, “Garbage in, garbage out.” Today, into the maw of large language models, some garbage no doubt goes. But these large language models are also fed, as I understand it, all the text that exists on the internet and that includes the great works of world literature (though maybe not very recent works). It is becoming more common to allow these models or chatbots to write essays, analyses, business plans, and the like. As a teacher of poetry writing, I wanted to see how these bots might operate in the creative-writing classroom. I wanted to find out if robots made good poets.
To attempt to answer this, I created an exercise for my Summer 2023 Drexel University poetry writing class to see how and how well ChatGPT generated poems. The exercise comprised several steps. Students first had to engineer a prompt that included a topic, a mood, and some key words. That took some thinking and attention to self. Next, students told their chatbots to produce a poem based on their engineered prompts. The bots produced the poems in fifteen seconds. Following this, students shared the bot poems out loud in class and posted them on our teaching platform (Blackboard), and we workshopped the robot poems. Finally, the students had to harvest from their robot poems any usable lines and make them part of their own follow-up poem. As a means of attribution, the students were required to underline the robot-written lines they added to their self-written follow-up poems. (It does feel weird to use the term self-written).
Occasionally the students found some strong and usable lines in the robot poems. More often than not, however, the students condemned the robot poems as soulless and rote imitations of verse. Not only were the students vehement and harsh critics of the robot poems, they were enthusiastic about each other’s real voices, praising each other’s follow-up poems for their sincerity and heart. I was very encouraged by the students’ overall negative attitude to the chatbot poems. As much as I hate to say this, I was a little less harsh than the students about some of the AI poems.
The students in this class were sophomores on up and came from a wide variety of majors. No one was required to participate in this exercise. Three students did opt out of the exercise: a philosophy major, a computer science major, and an English major.
Of course, the robots were good at spelling, mechanics, and standard English grammar. This was a benefit to all, especially the English language learners in the class. I appreciated the clean copy as I did not have to pinpoint glitches in proofreading. Almost always when the tool saw the term “poem” in the prompt, it generated a rhymed poem even when the student’s prompt specified an unrhymed poem. Once in a while, the bots committed the classic error of sacrificing meaning or correct usage in the service of rhyme. Sometimes I could detect the influence of English and American poets from the tradition in the AI poems even when the students did not request a poem “in the style of.”
I present here a selection of student-engineered prompts, the raw robot poems, students’ own poems connected with the exercise, workshop comments about the robot poems, and a few other observations. Finally, I include some of my students’ overall comments on the exercise and some of my own opinions about the future of AI-generated literature. All the students quoted and named here gave me permission to use their work and their names.
The precursor prompt
Before I began the more creative part of the exercise, I had all the participating students ask ChatGPT to write an unrhymed ten-line poem from a prompt I engineered. The bot was to write a poem about a man named Sam who encounters a wolf while hiking in the woods, incorporating the words “gray,” “the smell of green weeds,” “teeth,” “gun,” “afraid,” “run,” “yell,” “twilight,” “safe.” All the robot poems were different!
Samples from the multi-step exercise
English major Diamond Warney offered ChatGPT this prompt:
No rhyme scheme. Ominous and foreboding mood – “Something is coming. Use the verbs ‘devour,’ ‘drown,’ ‘mourn,’ ‘sleep’ and ‘drive.’ Use the adjectives ‘godly,’ ‘delicious,’ ‘heavenly,’ and ‘pungent.’ Use elements of different religions and faiths. Use the words ‘purple,’ ‘garlic,’ and ‘hospital.’ Use the phrase, ‘Richie, don’t be late for dinner.’” Diamond underlined the phrases in the raw ChatGPT poem that she included in her original poem, and she underlined those raw phrases (or their revisions) in her follow-up poem.
Here is the raw ChatGPT poem generated from Diamond’s prompt:
untitled
In shadows cast by gods of old and new,
An ominous veil, foreboding, weaves its view,
As whispers 'cross diverse faiths, they fly,
The harbinger of change, impending nigh.
Devouring stars, a cosmic tempest looms,
Religions' ancient scripts in heavenly tombs,
They drown in sacred waters, souls in mourn,
While deities in slumber, await their cosmic turn.
From east to west, the chariots of fate do drive,
A pungent scent of garlic, offerings alive,
Yet Richie, don't be late for dinner, pray,
For in this mystic hour, worlds may fall away.
Purple shrouds the horizon, darkness to distill,
A hospital for hope, a reckoning, and will.
Of this poem, Diamond remarked, “The first and last lines are interesting and could be reworked and added to a better work. I also like the line, ‘Richie, don’t be late for dinner, pray.’ I didn’t think about praying before meals when I wrote the prompts. I think ChatGPT could be used to connect ideas you had but didn’t realize were related. The bot didn’t pick up on tone and literally used the words in the poem, but there are some ominous images in here like the mass of purple on the horizon. The bot also connected some of the words that I used in the prompt, like garlic and pungent.”
A few observations from me as instructor:
My take here is that the AI knew many stock phrases about spirituality and the cosmos and churned them into a rhymed sonnet even though Diamond didn’t ask for a sonnet. The program mostly used Diamond’s key words in the order she listed them in her prompt. It did not use the word “godly,” but did use the word “god.”
Below is the follow-up poem Diamond created incorporating some AI-generated phrases. These are underlined.
Kitchen Sink
By Diamond Warney
Babies left behind
by gods of yesterday and today
at fire stations, on doorsteps, in pews
reaching out plump hands
trying to catch the stars.
The only sign the gods were ever there.
My mother left me
in a gas station. I drank warm fuel from the pumps
and got high on the smell of Black & Mild’s.
In death, our atoms spread
to become tiny pieces of everything.
We are beautiful and cosmic.
We are ourselves again.
You said you knew I was trouble
from the way I drive, with my head out the window
devouring stars and flies.
No one taught me to stay inside the lines
So drown me in the sacred waters
your mother bathed you in
before you grew out of the kitchen sink.
Maybe then, I’ll know how to be loved.
Maybe then, I will be cleansed.
A few observations from me as instructor:
Diamond’s new poem cries out in sympathy for discarded and abandoned children whose only solace, sadly, comes from a mysterious connection to the universe. Then she shifts to a literary speaker who is an outsider, a foundling left at a gas station and who knows the world from gas station odors, such as the smell of tobacco and gasoline. The voice then speaks as an adult who still sees herself as an outsider evoked in part by the image of her dangerously driving with her head out of a car window.
Aliyadeth Griffiths, an English major, did a turn-about. First, she wrote her own poem on the theme of striving, critically assessing the self in the mirror, and incorporating the sentences, “Be more. Do more.”
Are You Satisfied Yet?
By Aliyadeth Griffiths
As I look at myself in the mirror,
Reflections of all I could be watch me intently,
Their eyes gazing with avid curiosity.
They haunt the bathroom mirror,
With a sinister smile plastered across their face.
Like lurking shadows, they taunt me.
“Be more. Do more.” They breathe against my neck.
In return, I stare at my decaying appearance.
My skin, fractured and pale, crumbling under my touch,
The dark circles underneath my eyes rise as I try to smile,
My hands trembling from fatigue.
“Be more. Do more.” They whisper again, their cries louder this time,
The voices of the expectations echoing on the reflection,
Reminding me that I am meant to be nothing but perfection.
The bones in my body creak loudly as I stand,
Aching and frail, I stare at all the work that haunts me in my sleep.
I can always do more.
I can always be more.
I can always work harder than I ever have before.
The voices in the mirror seem pleased by my response,
As I turn away from my reflection,
My body collapsing on the floor.
Aliyadeth’s own poem speaks through graphic and even ghoulish imagery that invokes feelings of self-criticism and self-condemnation, and it includes a strong charge to try even harder to achieve better things. There emerges an interesting dialogue with the self in the mirror.
After composing her own poem, Aliyadeth provided this prompt to ChatGPT. “Write a horror 22-line poem about being a burnout high achiever, including the phrase, ‘Be more. Do more.'” She also asked the bot to create a title. Here is what the robot wrote.
Whispers of the Abyss: The Burnout's Lament
In shadows cast by fractured dreams, I dwell,
A burnout high achiever's cursed spell,
Once driven by the whispers of success's lore,
Now trapped within a labyrinth of endless chore.
Be more. Do more. The mantra drilled in bone,
A relentless pursuit, a heart turned stone,
I climbed the pinnacles of acclaim and might,
Only to find the abyss in that blinding light.
Frenzied steps echoed, accolades in tow,
Yet the void within grew with every glow,
A phantom grin masked the wearied soul,
As I danced on embers, an unholy toll.
Be more. Do more. The voices never cease,
A crescendo of torment, a maddening peace,
Shadows stretch, merging with fractured mind,
In this twisted symphony, where hopes unwind.
Reflections leer, distorted and askew,
A burnout's tale, a nightmare woven true,
Haunted by echoes of an insatiable roar,
Be more. Do more. Until you're no more.
Here are peer comments on Aliyadeth’s two poems.
From Maura Mealy, a psychology major:
As always, your work is stellar! As much as I hate to say, I enjoyed an aspect of the bot poem, the repetition in the “Be more. Do More.” The lines were surprising from ChatGPT, but it was part of your original prompt! Your actual poem blew the AI out of the water. The actual narrative and story felt realistic and relatable. The repetition in this felt much more natural and flowed better in the poem, and it was just, in general, more of an enjoyable read. The AI gets bogged down in trying to use fanciful words while you actually utilize descriptors to move the poem along. Great job, as always!!
From Zakee Aleem, a finance major:
The poem drafted by AI was surpringly good even tho still void of so much emotion or even a setting. I think it somehow works because the prompt lends itself to a cold poem void of love and affection. Your poem is much more emotional and I can really place myself in this poem much easier. Great work!
A few observations from me as instructor:
In the bot-generated version, I heard echoes of Byron, Shelley, and Poe. The AI poem had a drumming rhythm and remorseful tone that suited the subject and the injunction to “Be more. Do more.”
Every so often, the bot would come up with a very sophisticated line. Malachi Solomon, a general studies major, told the bot to write an unrhymed sad poem with these terms: “kick, punch, stupid, good, honest, helpful, caring, fragrant, bang, uncle.” Although the AI poem was filled with the stock observations and persistent rhyme, the robot did come up with one terrific example of anthimeria (use of one part of speech as if it were another): “A kick to the heart, a punch in the think.” “A punch in the think.” What a great phrase. It evokes a harsh and shocking assault to the mind. While Malachi did not decide to use that phrase in his follow-up poem, I have to give AI some props for generating it. Makes me wonder what was going on in the think of the program.
How beneficial is ChatGPT to you as a poet?
I posed this question to the class, and here are some of the students’ responses.
From Anna Bokarev, and English and writing major:
To me personally, I don’t think ChatGPT will be all that beneficial. In fact, I found it really difficult to workshop the poem that ChatGPT spit out for me. It didn’t really have a tone or voice, and workshopping that into the poem required me to tear it apart and delete most of it. I also wasn’t the biggest fan of the phrases it used. Some of them were pretty interesting, but they were all so surface level that I couldn’t really incorporate them into a narrative-styled poem. ChatGPT was doing a lot of telling but not a lot of showing.
I also just think reading the work and finding inspiration from real writers is a far better way to do it than consulting ChatGPT. There’s voice and passion in the work of human writers, which I believe is what ultimately inspires a writer. For now, I’d rather avoid the tool at all costs. It seemed to make my writing process more difficult and dull.
From Grace Dhankhar, a computer science major. Grace was one of the students who opted out of the ChatGPT experiment:
Personally, I am very against the use of AI tools like ChatGPT, and I have very strong feelings about it, but I understand that people are going to use it regardless of my opinion of it. With that being said, if people are going to use it, I think that it would be a cool tool if someone wanted to find a new way to say something or a new phrase, since some of the phrases the AI came up with were sort of eloquent, but I would absolutely never rely on it to create anything actually creative. With all of the examples shown in class, the human poem or revision of the poem is so much better and less nonsensical since the AI couldn’t really put together coherent thoughts together.
From Aliyadeth Griffiths, English major:
For me, ChatGPT has always been more hindering than helpful, especially when it comes to the writing process. I find that reading the bot’s writing before coming up with my own often confuses me, because of its excessive eloquence, along with feeling as if I can’t use any idea the bot might’ve come up with because of the questionable ethics. I also don’t particularly enjoy using even one line from it, as I feel like I’m stealing from the authors the bot has been fed.
While I am not completely against ever using AI (I feel like there is no point in being so against it—this is the way technology moving forward, and there’s no point in trying to fight it; especially when it is being used so often, by so many people and organizations), but I don’t particularly enjoy it. It feels wrong, as we can’t make sure which of these authors would actually be okay with their work being used this way. While I do think it’s crazy how far technology has come (for better or for worse!), it feels wrong to use it, especially with the writers’ strike going on as writers are not being paid enough to make a living.
[Note: The Writers Guild of America strike, which began on May 2, 2023, was still going as of the writing of this post in late August 2023.]
From Maura Mealy, psychology major:
I think it’s essential to make the distinction that ChatGPT/AI models like it should be used as tools and not solutions. We talked in class about how these models are fed information and language from great literary sources, like Poe or Wordsworth or whomever, but anyone can feed data into these models. You can tell the AI 2+2=100 enough times, and it’ll believe it. When using it to generate ideas or references, it’s super critical to fact-check them, especially when using it in a creative sense. We saw some fascinating lines come out of the AI poems from the class exercise, some of which didn’t totally suck. While the chance the AI-generated those lines entirely on its own is high, I still feel the need to do a quick Google search to check if these “good lines” were plagiarized material/lines someone else had fed into the machine.
In the context of writing poetry, this is not a useless tool. It can come up with pretty words/fancy phrases if you are looking for some old-school inspiration. The narratives it generates are straightforward and basic, with surface-level meaning. I feel like most poets seek a deeper meaning behind the pretty imagery used, which the bot just couldn’t create.
From a majority of students in the class:
The class suggested that I try this exercise next year because they said that the bots will change and people’s perceptions about large language models and other forms of AI will also change.
Some perspectives on the future of writing and AI:
The students’ pushback against the robots and their observations on the dangers of AI gave me faith in the value of human sensitivity and creativity. But the exercise also made me fearful. ChatGPT did occasionally come up with good lines. The large language model was built on the DNA of the literary tradition, and thus was more learned that the students or me or anyone. It suffered no gaps in education or memory. True self-expression grows out of subjectivity and that oddness that puts the stamp of individuality on a writer’s voice. Can a machine ever duplicate that individuality, or if not duplicate it create a new individuality altogether?
I am concerned, as many others are, that facile AI creations might dominate the arts or “popular culture” (whatever that is). Will the bot scribes, in time, coax us into accepting their recombinations and mutations of preexisting literature, no matter how elegant and respectful of the human condition that preexisting literature is? Will AI-generated literature become so widespread that we accept its verbiage as literature? Or, more concerningly, might AI create new believable individualities that produce real poetry?
This is not the first time that human ingenuity has unleashed great powers for human benefit or harm. Consider the printing press, the radio, the telephone, the internet. Think of the atomic bomb, gain-of-function viruses, human-caused climate change. Then think of increased freedom of expression, nuclear nonproliferation treaties, laws (heeded or not) against chemical and biological warfare, medical progress, the fight against global warming. Reflect on how effective AI already is for speeding along propaganda and untruth. In the midst of doomsday threats, the prospect of AI-created poetry seems barely worth the worry. Depending on how seriously AI dominates, poets and writers can resort to samizdat. It would not be the first time writers had to do that.
Congratulations to previous contributor Christine Ma-Kellams on the upcoming publication of her novel, The Band! On April 16th, 2024, readers will be able to purchase her book from Atria Books.
“Talent is a burden for which the only relief is attention.”
(But is it paying attention or giving it?) the footnote asks. The Band is a novel that melds the literary and the self-aware. Five K-pop idols rise to unparalleled fame. One disappears. What is the difference between love and paying attention? And what do we miss regardless of how close we think we are watching? Christine Ma-Kellams’ work is humming with insight and connections. The story itself is supremely aware of its existence within a canon—albeit one that includes the Bible alongside Grand Theft Auto V. Often situating itself to other elements of culture, The Band effortlessly stands apart as one of the most unconventional reads of 2024.
Ma-Kellams’ novel has already received well-deserved praise:
“This could very well be the first great K-Pop literary phenomenon.”
—Debutiful, Most Anticipated Books of 2024
“No one else could have written this book.”
—Loan LE, Senior Editor at Atria Books
Ma-Kellams’ short story, “Chazzy,” can be found in Issue 19 of Superstition Review.
Christine Ma-Kellams is a Harvard-trained cultural psychologist, Pushcart-nominated fiction writer, and first-generation American. Her work and writing have appeared in Huffpost, Chicago Tribune, Catapult, Salon, The Wall Street Journal, The Rumpus, and much more. The Band is her first novel. You can find her in person in one of California’s coastal cities or online at ChristineMa-Kellams.com.
Congratulations to Ananda Lima on the upcoming release of her fiction debut, Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil! The novel with be available June 18th from Tor Books and is available for pre-order now.
Craft is a surreal literary linked short story collection revolving around the absurdity of our times, art, and writing, as well as a complex view of the immigrant experience. The stories are written by a writer who meets with the Devil again and again throughout her life, after sleeping with him at a Halloween party in 1999.
The book has already received significant praise:
“Here is a collection of stories that not only delights in its ability to subvert the reader’s expectations but also leaves one haunted.”
—The Kenyon Review
“My only problem with this book is the title, and that’s because I love it so much. Ananda Lima didn’t write these stories for the Devil, she wrote them for me! An absolutely thrilling reminder that short stories can be the best kind of magic, conjuring up not only the devil, but real emotion, real surprise, real strangeness.”
—Kelly Link, author of The Book of Love
Ananda Lima’s poem “Transa” can be found in Issue 20 of s[r]. She can also be found on her website and across her social media accounts: @anandalima: i | t | b | fb | @.
Ananda Lima is a poet, translator, and fiction writer born in Brasília, Brazil, now living in Chicago, IL. She’s the author of the poetry collection Mother/land, winner of the Hudson Prize. Her work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, Poets.org, Kenyon Review Online, Gulf Coast, Pleiades, The Common, Witness, and elsewhere. She has been awarded the inaugural WIP Fellowship by Latinx-in-Publishing. She has an MA in Linguistics from UCLA and an MFA in Creative Writing in Fiction from Rutgers University, Newark.
Congratulations to past contributor Cynthia Marie Hoffman who has a new poetry collection coming out on February 6th entitled Exploding Head.
This collection of prose poems chronicles a woman’s childhood onset and adult journey through obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), which manifests in fearful obsessions and counting compulsions that impact her relationship to motherhood, religion, and the larger world. Cynthia Marie Hoffman’s unsettling, image-rich poems chart the interior landscape of the obsessive mind. Along with an angel who haunts the poems’ speaker throughout her life, she navigates her fear of guns and accidents, fears for the safety of her child, and reckons with her own mortality, ultimately finding a path toward peace.
This book has received significant praise:
“Hoffman’s fourth book compresses the relentlessness of fear and obsession into electrifying prose poems, boxes threatening to burst. Hoffman scrutinizes the child self and the mother self with absorbing candor, precision, music, and urgency in this harrowing world where ‘birds bomb through the air like the skulls of galloping horses.’ The impulses that sprint through the mind—‘a shuddering animal hunkered down inside your skull’—come so frightfully alive that I felt I’d been transported into another woman’s extraordinary brain.”—Eugenia Leigh, author of Bianca
View more of Cynthia’s work on her website. Purchase Exploding Head here.
Cynthia Marie Hoffman is the author of four poetry collections: Exploding Head (Feb, 2024), Sightseer, Paper Doll Fetus, and Call Me When You Want to Talk about the Tombstones, as well as the chapbook Her Human Costume. Hoffman is the recipient of a Diane Middlebrook Fellowship in Poetry at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Wisconsin Arts Board, and a Director’s Guest fellowship at the Civitella Ranieri Center in Italy. Her work has appeared in Smartish Pace, Fence, diode, The Journal, The Missouri Review, and elsewhere. Collections have appeared as an intro feature in Pleiades, a featured chapbook in Mid-American Review, and in the annual Introductions Reading Loop online at Blackbird.
View Cynthia Marie Hoffmans’ poems “This Is All True,” “Protection Spell Jar,” and “If You Have Grown Unrecognizable to Yourself” in issue 30 of Superstition Review.
Winner of the Juniper Prize for Fiction Available March 1
We at Superstition Review are pleased to congratulate previous contributor Terese Svoboda on her upcoming release of two novels!
In Roxy and Coco, the namesake sisters are two glamorous harpies—mythical bird women—attempting to outrun extinction and fix the planet by preventing child abuse, one child at a time. Navigating urgent social work with abusive parents, personal attractions with complicated suspicions, curious homicides and surprise interventions, Roxy and Coco is a mythical reimagining with the soul of modern woes and foes, and the thrill of modern superheroes.
Winner of the Juniper Prize, The Long Swim is a collection of cynical, irreverent, and formally daring short stories. From a runaway circus lion that haunts a small town where two lovers risk more than their respective marriages, to a junket to Cuba and an ambassador’s dalliance with a niece hide dark secrets and political revolution. Inventive, dark, and absurd, these stories capture Svoboda’s clear-eyed, wry angle on the world: a place of violence and uncertainty but also wild beauty, adventure, and love both lasting and ephemeral. Globe-trotting, barbed, nuanced, and deeply human, The Long Swim will speak to fans of Lauren Groff, Helen DeWitt, George Saunders, and Amy Hempel.
Both novels have already received enthusiastic reviews:
“There are many mythic reimaginings out there, but I can guarantee you that Roxy and Coco is unlike anything you’ve read—Terese Svoboda’s harpies are winged avengers, a celestial task force who save kids who have been abused by their terrestrial protectors.”
—Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia! and Sleep Donation
“Existing at the sweet spot between Rachel Ingalls’ Mrs. Caliban, Donald Barthelme’s Snow White, and James Purdy’s I Am Elijah Thrush, Roxy and Coco plucks a creature out of myth to bring it into our present—and does so in a way that keeps a steady eye on the flaws of our own weird moment. Rarely has fantastic fiction managed to say so much so deftly about the real while still offering a terrific, strange and highly original read.”
—Brian Evenson, author of Last Days and Song for the Unraveling of the World
“Terese Svoboda is a master of the dire and the blackly comic and a virtuoso of economy and voice, and The Long Swim features the jaunty and the wounded who in extremis maintain their wit and lacerating self-awareness.”
—Jim Shepard, author of The Book of Aron and Like You’d Understand, Anyway
“One of those writers you would be tempted to read regardless of the setting or the period or the plot or even the genre.”
—Bloomsbury Review
Terese Svoboda is the author of over twenty books, including fiction, poetry, biography, translation, and memoir, including the recent novel, Dog on Fire (2023). Her many honors include a Guggenheim fellowship, the Bobst Prize in fiction, the Iowa Poetry Prize, An NEH translation grant, The Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize, a Jerome Foundation grant, the O. Henry Award for the short story, and a Pushcart Prize for the essay.
You can read her story in Superstition Review Issue 7 here. You can read her interview for s[r] here. She has also published guest posts on our blog. Her work can be found in its entirety on her website.
Superstition Review is open to submissions for Issue 33. Our submission window closes January 31st, 2024 at 11:59 p.m.
Our magazine is looking for art, fiction, nonfiction, and poetry submissions. You can submit here.
Ensure you read all guidelines before submitting. Do not submit previously published work. Simultaneous submissions are permitted, but please alert Superstition Review to a piece’s potential publication elsewhere. Submissions are able to be withdrawn and part of a submission can be withdrawn if a note is added in submittable.
View Issue 32 of Superstition Review to understand the type of work our literary magazine publishes.
