Five Lines / Issue 6
U2 gets dizzy, AI gets weird, Christian Wiman looks outward, and May Sarton looks inward. Plus: a new poem from yours truly.
Hello loved ones. This is the Five Lines curated poetry letter, in which I share poetic stuff I’ve discovered and why it matters to me. Five Lines is, like everything else here at Tethered Letters, AI-free.
1. "This isn’t a debate about whether AI can write poetry. It’s a debate about how much longer it will matter that humans can."
Recently, I asked ChatGPT to write me a poem. The result was less than satisfactory. Like, really bad. Even with copious coaching, it still produced absolute dreck. And it wasn't that it was nonsense, it was just... boring.
Come to find out, poetry is actually considered something of a barrier of entry for AI. ChatGPT may be able to answer almost any question put to it, solve complex mathematical problems, and even write convincing advertising copy (unsurprising) and sermons (depressing). But when it comes to poetry, it stumbles.
"The most profound exercise of full human consciousness, poetry has long been coveted as a benchmark for silicon-based minds, the ultimate proof of concept."
That's from this article by Carmine Starnino, with the click-worthy title "Robots Are Writing Poetry, and Many People Can’t Tell the Difference." The entry point here is a 1984 book of "poetry" by someone called Racter, The Policeman’s Beard Is Half-Constructed, which is now a collectible item because it was actually the first book of "poetry" authored by a robot. Here's a bit of Racter's verse:
"I am silicon and epoxy energy enlightened by line current. What distances, what chasms, are to be bridged here? Leave me alone, and what can happen? This. I ate my leotard, that old leotard that was feverishly replenished by hoards of screaming commissioners."
Okay, so robots are writing weird and boring poetry. So what? Well, the unfortunate fact is that it's not really the robots that are learning — it's us.
"AI will heighten, and push us to honour, poetry as a “construct,” a system of vocabularies, a remote-controlled theatricality. We may end up cherishing the superficial and arbitrary effects most feasible for algorithms, becoming bored with interiority. Writing will appear less risky, less troublesome. We will be free of the expectation actually to understand it. We will also be free of its judgment on us — the demand that, as Rilke put it, “you must change your life." . . . This isn’t a debate about whether AI can write poetry. It’s a debate about how much longer it will matter that humans can."
Like most technologies we humans obsess over, AI is another mirror to our souls, another way we can reduce our humanity down to ones and zeros, another way we replicate ourselves in machine form. And the more we let our tools shape us into automatons, the more our poetry will read like it's produced by robots.
But not everyone is quite so pessimistic about the impending robot uprising. Keith Holyoak over at MIT Press, for one, doesn't think this is the end of humanity as we know it:
"AI lacks what is most needed to place the footprints of its own consciousness on another mind: inner experience. That is, experience shaded by the accumulated memories derived over a lifetime. The absence of inner experience also means that AI lacks what is most needed to appreciate poetry: a sense of poetic truth, which is grounded not in objective reality but rather in subjective experience."
I'm not here to offer answers to such a dilemma, but I suspect the path forward has more to do with the unseen work of poets who care less about the numbers and more about writing good poetry.
2. "where people have lived in inwardness / The air is charged with blessing and does bless"
“The Work of Happiness”
from Collected Poems, 1930-1993
May Sarton
I thought of happiness, how it is woven
Out of the silence in the empty house each day
And how it is not sudden and it is not given
But is creation itself like the growth of a tree.
No one has seen it happen, but inside the bark
Another circle is growing in the expanding ring.
No one has heard the root go deeper in the dark,
But the tree is lifted by this inward work
And its plumes shine, and its leaves are glittering.
So happiness is woven out of the peace of hours
And strikes its roots deep in the house alone:
The old chest in the corner, cool waxed floors,
White curtains softly and continually blown
As the free air moves quietly about the room;
A shelf of books, a table, and the white-washed wall —
These are the dear familiar gods of home,
And here the work of faith can best be done,
The growing tree is green and musical.
For what is happiness but growth in peace,
The timeless sense of time when furniture
Has stood a life’s span in a single place,
And as the air moves, so the old dreams stir
The shining leaves of present happiness?
No one has heard thought or listened to a mind,
But where people have lived in inwardness
The air is charged with blessing and does bless;
Windows look out on mountains and the walls are kind.
I have not yet had the pleasure of reading much of May Sarton's work, but this poem and some snippets from her Journal of a Solitude have convinced me that I need to dive deeper. The latter is a diary of sorts chronicling her interior life during her 60th year, and you can find some of it at The Marginalian (thanks to my good friend and fellow poet Hannah for sending me there!)
"It is an age where more and more human beings are caught up in lives where fewer and fewer inward decisions can be made, where fewer and fewer real choices exist. The fact that a middle-aged, single woman, without any vestige of family left, lives in this house in a silent village and is responsible only to her own soul means something. The fact that she is a writer and can tell where she is and what it is like on the pilgrimage inward can be of comfort. It is comforting to know there are lighthouse keepers on rocky islands along the coast. Sometimes, when I have been for a walk after dark and see my house lighted up, looking so alive, I feel that my presence here is worth all the Hell."
And that's what this poem is: an ode to presence, a validation of all that is unseen as just as important — in some sense, more important — than the things we have paraded in front of the world for that very validation. This "growth in peace," beautifully located in the images of tree rings and and kind walls and cool floors... I know this growth, and I am somehow always tempted to discount it, when I should rather thank God for the daily work of His Spirit, how He draws me into peace and joy and hope through the most ordinary things.
3. "Your love is teaching me how / How to kneel"
“Vertigo”
from How to Dismantle An Atomic Bomb
U2
Unos, dos, tres, catorce!
(Turn it up loud, captain)
Lights go down, it's dark
The jungle is your head, can't rule your heart
A feeling so much stronger than a thought
Your eyes are wide
And though your soul, it can't be bought
Your mind can wanderChorus:
Hello, hello (¡Hola!)
I'm at a place called Vertigo (¿Dónde está?)
It's everything I wish I didn't know
Except you give me something I can feel
The night is full of holes
As bullets rip the sky of ink with gold
They twinkle as the boys play rock and roll
They know that they can't dance
At least they know
I can't stand the beats, I'm asking for the cheque
The girl with crimson nails has Jesus round her neck
Swinging to the music, swinging to the music
Oh, oh, oh
All of this, all of this can be yours
Just give me what I want and no one gets hurt
Your love is teaching me how
How to kneel
Kneel
This song is such a banger. Bono has talked about this song as one of the few U2 songs he can listen to without cringing (which is funny for all kinds of reasons).
And it is a banger not only because of the bass growl vibrating your entire body or Edge shredding one of the best guitar riffs ever written, or the incredibly satisfying melody line. The lyrics here, from the very first confusing countoff, mirror the momentum and chaotic energy of the music (and vice versa).
The lines fragment and weave in and out of each other, tossing Bono's signature layered images around until the listener is spiralling. The marriage of lines like "The jungle is your head" and "bullets rip the sky of ink with gold" with a stumbling two-note melodic motive increases the discombobulation. But it all, start to finish, still feels good.
And in the middle of this there's a central odd juxtaposition: "The girl with crimson nails has Jesus round her neck." Somehow, in the center of the maelstrom, the cross appears, and that is what holds his attention. This is not only the beauty that surpasses what the world and the devil offers ("all of this could be yours...") it is what rights him in the eye of the storm. Which is why the last switch from "feel" to "kneel" is so cathartic.
I think Bono says it pretty well in Surrender:
"To be a man of the world but not this one is, I guess, the idea behind the song. You get the sense that the singer is not sure if that's possible but he's gonna try as hard as hell. In the end it's the bass that offers the devil denial, the bass that offers the great 'f--k off.'"
4. "... that life is not the life of men."
“From a Window”
from Every Riven Thing
Christian Wiman
Incurable and unbelieving
in any truth but the truth of grieving,
I saw a tree inside a tree
rise kaleidoscopically
as if the leaves had livelier ghosts.
I pressed my face as close
to the pane as I could get
to watch that fitful, fluent spirit
that seemed a single being undefined
or countless beings of one mind
haul its strange cohesion
beyond the limits of my vision
over the house heavenwards.
Of course I knew those leaves were birds.
Of course that old tree stood
exactly as it had and would
(but why should it seem fuller now?)
and though a man's mind might endow
even a tree with some excess
of life to which a man seems witness,
that life is not the life of men.
And that is where the joy came in.
This is a poem that unfolds on repeat reads. On a technical level, I admire the specific word choices that not only say what he means but make you feel it ("fitful, fluent spirit" "haul its strange cohesion," "heavenwards," "endow... with some excess"); I find deep satisfaction in his uncommon rhymes and speech-like irregular rhythms, the natural flow of someone at home in language itself.
But it's not just the poem that unfolds, it's also the nature of existence itself unfolding, of a tree that is more than a tree, of birds that are more than birds. The mind of man, beyond it's own interest in attributing more meaning to matter than might be warranted, is not in control of this life that the poet sees.
That pivot from grief to joy is not brought about by something the poet or reader has done. Rather: the Life that fills all life, that doesn't depend on you or I or the great poets or powerful leaders, erupts and swirls and takes on shapes we don't understand. And somehow, always it reveals itself to us. Somehow, always, it comes to us when we are at our most broken, and says: "look up."
5. "Long ago I looked for joy, but now / it surprises me, a miracle"
ironweed
I would take a significant cut in pay to spend
my days cataloguing the birdsong sung
in a single quarter-acre plot of land.
I wonder if I could ever complete the task.
All of these flowers collect more colors
than my eyes can archive. Also,
I cannot count the hairs on my child's head
or stand still enough to calm a wary deer
or avoid the squirrel darting into traffic.
I do not have the wherewithal to map
a single square inch of the sky. I doubt
I will ever translate the messages of bees,
or graph the chitinous scales of a swallowtail's wing.
I have no hope of kissing away every tear
that will ornament my daughter's cheek.
Long ago I looked for joy, but now
it surprises me, a miracle
of slender stem and stamen flashing past.
I am older now, yet I have seen
so little ironweed. I do not think I could press
every wild flower this kind world offers
into a single volume, and mail it
free of charge to each despairing soul.
And yet, all things considered,
it seems worthy to try.
After years of looking for ironweed along our roads and fields, Linnea found a single ironweed plant in our back meadow a week ago. It was worth the wait.
That’s all for today, friends. Thoughts? Any lines you’ve loved lately? Send them my way. — Chris