Huge thanks to LitBowl on Instagram for the feature!

I’m lying on my back, scrawny feet up in the stirrups. In my head, I go like, don’t look, don’t look, don’t you look at her, but of course, I do. I raise my head, and there next to the gynecologist is Mom, peering into my most private me. Mom cranes her neck over the doctor’s head to bear witness, to be there when the doctor announces her verdict…

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Poetry is having a moment. Yes, yes, we’ve heard this before—usually during National Poetry Month in April. Or the inauguration of a president or the selection of a new poet laureate. But in this case the moment is coming from an unlikely source: the meteoric emergence of artificial intelligence large language models and the remarkable text they can generate.

For doomsayers, the future is clear: AI will destroy humanity.

Champions of these new technologies, however, claim that they will free us from the often tedious work of rote reporting and summarizing information and will enhance human capacity to synthesize knowledge and thus find better solutions to everyday and extraordinary problems more quickly and authoritatively. Huzzah! But among the most curious and perhaps frequently noted claims from these same cheerleaders is that AI can also . . . write poetry!!!

“If From the Longing Orchard were a line from Shakespeare, it would be Polonius’ ‘To thine own self be true.'”

A writer watched her husband become enthralled with AI technology, using it as an outlet for his own type of storytelling. But, ChatGPT’s — and his — penchant for violent narratives made her wary.

When my husband, Gary, first started playing with ChatGPT, I thought it would be a passing fancy. He finds new technology intriguing and usually tries to test its limits before growing bored. But I reconsidered the intensity of his relationship with the program when I awoke at 2 a.m. one night to the light of his iPad and found him gleefully immersed in feeding the AI sitcom premises.

“Listen to this,” he said. “You’ve got to hear these stories. They’re fascinating.” He started with a show from his childhood, I Love Lucy. He gave the AI an era-appropriate but slightly risqué premise: “Fred buys Ethel a corset.” In ChatGPT’s plot, Ethel struggles to put the corset on, enlists Lucy’s help, fails, and then hands the corset over to Lucy, who also tries to put it on and gets stuck in it. The “girls” destroy the Ricardos’ NYC apartment in the process. Ricky gets home and bellows his trademark “Lucy!!!” Hilarity ensues.

Gary moved through the eras and sitcoms with the same premise until he got to Maude, the 1970s All in the Family spin-off, with its second-wave feminist protagonist and her supportive but not always enlightened husband, Walter. “Walter gives Maude a corset,” Gary prompted. The real Maude would have protested; what did she need a corset for?

At the Longfellow House in Cambridge, MA, poet Afaa Weaver will be the recipient of our New England Poetry Club’s prestigious Golden Rose Award. Last year’s winner was Patricia Smith.

Artem Mozgovoy discusses his debut novel, Spring in Siberia, with the managing editor of Red Hen Press, Dr. Kate Gale. The work has been praised by Publishers Weekly as a “superb debut”, “touching and well written, genuinely compelling and convincing” by Sir Stephen Fry, and “a capacious work of vision, courage, and thoroughness” by Ocean Vuong. 

Artem takes Kate through his childhood in central Siberia, his career starting as a cadet reporter at 16 and the editor-in-chief by 26, and, eventually, his shift into creative writing.

Debut novel Aqueous by author Jade Shyback captures young imaginations

Aqueous is a Young Adult thriller set on the brink of the Earth’s collapse…which sends young Marisol Blaise to live in a colony beneath the sea. Author Jade Shyback tells us why she wanted to write a novel for young adults.