Pep Talk

On a different kind of AI

Hi, Friend.

I’m here with a pep talk. Or is it a craft talk? I think it’s both.

I’ve been in Chicago since last Sunday, teaching a poetry workshop for StoryStudio during the week, and participating in the StoryBoard festival this weekend. It’s a been a warm, engaging, immersive experience. What a luxury, to be gathered with writers for a solid week, talking about writing, learning from one another, and having some fun (and eating arepas and pizza) along the way.

For StoryBoard I gave a talk about embracing error. Why error? Because it’s human. Let me explain. Over the past few months, I’ve found myself answering a lot of questions about AI. Since Dear Writer is a craft book about creativity in general and writing specifically, on tour I expected questions about the rise of artificial intelligence. As a writer and a teacher, I’m deeply concerned about the increasing use of AI. Writing is thinking on the page. If we use artificial intelligence to write essays, poems, and stories, we’re outsourcing our thinking.

If we’re going to withstand the rise of AI, I think we need to double down on our humanity. We can do things that generative AI can’t do, because we have experiences that AI can’t have. We can dream and imagine. We can second-guess ourselves, doubt, regret. We can hope and grieve. Humans have a point of view because of what we’ve been through, and because of our relationships with others. I want to read writing from that place. I want a different kind of AI: authentic intelligence.

The poems I admire most and hold dear are the poems behind which I can sense a real human being. I trust in the singularity of their point of view even if I don’t always understand or agree with that point of view. I think writing and reading build empathy for this reason: we are invited, even encouraged, to consider the experiences and perspectives of others. We’re sharing in someone else’s humanity when we spend time with their writing, because we’re spending time with their mind.

One of the best ways to make our poems more human, I think, is to let the reader see the mind—meaning the grappling and even the imperfection. The metaphor I keep coming back to is kintsugi, which translates as “golden joinery.” It’s the centuries-old Japanese art of mending broken ceramics with gold. The artist doesn’t hide the cracks, but fills them with lacquer dusted with powdered gold, silver, or platinum, so that the piece gleams where it was pieced back together. Importantly, the object is made more beautiful and more valuable because of this process.

Maybe kintsugi in poetry is when the poet makes a mistake but decides to keep it, and in fact calls attention to it. I think of poems like “How Killer Blue Irises Spread” by Kelli Russell Agodon; “The Kudzu, Everywhere” by Amorak Huey; “Melancholia” by Paul Guest; and “The Direction of Light” by Linda Hogan—poems that embrace mishearings, misreadings, misunderstandings, or even typos. My poem “Written Deer” from Goldenrod is an example as well. In each of these poems, an error leads to new insights, layers of meaning, or exciting associative leaps. Amorak Huey’s family/kudzu metaphor was a result of mistyping! The mistake, in fact, was a gift. It was the place where the poet discovered new territory, and the part where the poem introduced the poet to its subject.

I think a lot about how the words author and authority are related. What does it do to the authority of the poet—and the speaker—when errors are allowed to remain and play an important role in a poem? I’d argue that it’s worth the risk, and that there is value in that transparency. I’d argue that it doesn’t undermine the authority of the poet or speaker as much as it prioritizes authenticity.

By allowing imperfection into our poems—by letting some of the breaks and repairs show—we’re allowing for a different kind of intimacy between the reader and writer. I read poems to witness someone else’s mind at work, and these moments of error or brokenness, those switchbacks and wait-on-second-thoughts, help me see that work.

I don’t go to poetry for comfort, as a writer or as a reader. I go to poetry to be changed, to revise my own thinking. I’m much more likely to be changed by the original thinking of another human being, a voice I trust because it's honest with me, and because I can see myself mirrored in the utterance: the occasional faltering, or disorientation, or struggle to find a new foothold.

We’re imperfect. We slip up. We change our minds. We lose our train of thought. We misspeak or mishear or misunderstand. We do this, all of us, in our lives, but can we also sometimes do that in our work? I want to leave you with a prompt: Let some of the seams show in your next poem or essay. Accept the gifts that arrive packaged as missteps. Try not to buff out every scratch, or sand down every splinter. Give yourself permission to be more human.

Writing that shows its authentic intelligence—its thinking, however flawed or complicated that thinking may be—is writing that tells the truth.

Let’s tell the truth.

Happy writing—
Maggie