The New York Times obituary begins: “In the poetry marketplace, her praise had reputation-making power, while her disapproval could be withering.” I find it hard to imagine that anyone who spent a lifetime reading and writing about poetry would appreciate such a summary of her work.
I was teaching a poetry class and getting ready for our first meeting after a break, when it’s always a challenge to get back to the realities of a semester. I realized that I had forgotten to bring the two poems we were going to talk about, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight” and Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” I printed out a copy of each poem in my office and went off to teach.
The New York Review Books volume of Helen Keller’s writing, The World I Live In (2012), has a few pages of notes identifying sources for quoted material, but many such passages are left unidentified. Having looked up the unidentified bits in Keller’s prose (thank you, Google Books), I thought it appropriate to share them here, for anyone who might looking. They reflect a great breadth of reading and are someimes quoted imperfectly, from memory perhaps, or from a faulty source.
A passage from page 87 of Judge Arthur Engoron’s decision is getting considerable attetion: “The English poet Alexander Pope (1688-1744) first declared, ‘To err is human, to forgive is divine.‘” Actually, it’s “To err is human; to forgive, divine.” But to err is human.
I recall sitting in an NEH seminar and being told that if one wanted to befuddle colleagues, all that was necessary was to speak the word ekphrasis. Well, maybe. I’m not so sure.
I think of the parsnip as the carrot’s quiet cousin. There’s the carrot, in the center of the room, doing a magic trick or telling a colorful (heh) story. And there’s the parsnip, over in a corner, looking at the titles on the bookshelf.
ChatGPT has difficulty distinguishing “in the style of” from a hazy idea of subject matter. And ChatGPT assumes that almost all poets write in quatrains of iambic tetrameter, with clumsy rhymes and inspirational messages.
1983: “If you could accurately enter your whole life into a computer without leaving the minutest fact out, then the computer could possess a chance of becoming artistic. But even then the computer would have to be considered the protégé of its programmer. For now, computers may be profitably used as electronic thesauri, as servants to the new craft of electronic poetry-writing. As far as the art of poetry is concerned, computers will have to wait.” Still true.
More 500-word analyses of well-known poems, from John Ashbery, Elizabeth Bishop, Emily Dickinson, Philip Larkin, and William Butler Yeats. In each case, ChatGPT produces phrases and lines nowhere to be found in the poem.
I asked ChatGPT to write a 500-word analysis of Ted Berrigan’s poem “Red Shift.” It produced text with fake quotations that had nothing to do with the poem.
The Library of Congress has made available 420 recordings of poetry readings at the Poetry Project, St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery. And that’s just what the Library calls “the first round.”