I started thinking about this article, per usual, mid-conversation (ignore how rude that sounds). Like the water pressure on an old, rusted fountain, my thoughts began to dribble slowly into consciousness, then into a steady stream of sentences, and then a full-on geyser of epiphanies. This particular conversation took place on a Thursday afternoon, nearly dark enough to call night. I was on the second floor of UCLA’s English building, sitting outside of my favorite professor’s office and in somewhat of a waiting room queue for his expertise. Generally, I’m not the only one waiting, and this Thursday was no exception. A group of like-minded (in the sense that we’re all sitting there, generally nerd-like) individuals began discussing what type of writing we all preferred. Prose, poetry, fiction, nonfiction, fantasy, drama, sci-fi, you name it. But then, somebody defended poetry’s honor after someone truly terrible (me) said they hated it. This person, in defense, said something along these lines, which I’ve been thinking about ever since: humanity is poetry, and the ability to create and simply come up with something is poetry. Good, bad, ugly, stunning, it doesn’t matter — it’s poetry.
As Grammy-nominated contemporary poet aja monet stated in her opening lines at The Center for California Literature’s launch event, “A poem can rinse, reflect and reveal us / I give thanks for the intimacy of planting poems / the living that brings poems into being” (Los Angeles Times). And that’s just it. Poems are life. Poems are the manifestation of humanity’s ability to create. Of the chance to breathe, to think, to discern. Poetry reveals, interrogates, and brings forth some of the most gentle, most vulnerable, most soft, most visceral, most mostest moments we can ever hope to experience.
Within the same conversation, we pivoted to a discussion of artificial intelligence (A.I.), reflecting on what makes poetry both irreplaceable and irreplicable by A.I.. Giving full credit to my friend Sam, who shared these invaluable insights, I felt that I needed a day (or two, or twenty) to think about what we had discussed. And in sitting with this conversation (holding space, if you will), I’ve begun to think a bit differently about what exactly poetry is.
To clarify my earlier ridicule of poetry, I don’t actually hate it. Sure, I’ll say that dramatically sometimes, but that’s really just an easy rug to roll over the abyss that is my deep, intense fear of the poetic literary genre. Oftentimes, I find it more difficult to understand compared to, say, a book. If the overwhelming saturation of interpretation that can be found between stanzas, line breaks, and rhyme schemes weren’t enough, the intentionality alone required for poetry would have truly put the fear of God into me. I cannot imagine just how daunting it would be to be a poet, to put work out in the presence of the greats already there, and to share what feels so raw that it must pass over into realms of embarrassment.
To be a poet is to be vulnerable. And, in all honesty, what’s scarier than that?
Poetry is frightening in its ability to cut right to your core, but also miss you by a mile. I feel like sometimes you have to be a specific kind of smart to really get a poem. It’s like how, when one watches The Incredibles or Inside Out as a child, it doesn’t really resonate until you’re older, crying over that line you used to skip over, questioning everything that has ever happened to get you to this specific moment in time. Poetry feels existential. But then again, perhaps to be human, to truly embody this humanity, is to live an existential existence. Thus, poetry mirrors reality. And then, given all of that, who am I to judge it, tear it apart, analyze it to smithereens (for context, I’m an English major).
To not face this existentialism, it’s easier to say I don’t like poetry, even if that’s the cop-out of the century. So, in an effort to be a poet, to live in the uncomfortable, I’m writing this article. Notably, I write to accentuate the distinction between poetry and A.I., between effort and effortless, between simply living and being truly alive. So here goes nothing — or maybe everything.
Most importantly is the idea that the requirement of effort is what makes us human. If we didn’t exert effort — i.e., try — we wouldn’t fail. If we didn’t fail, we wouldn’t grow. If we didn’t grow, we’d never try again; we’d never succeed, fail, cry, love, lose, struggle, or overcome. In other words, we’d never live.
We try so hard, especially in Los Angeles, to look, feel, and appear effortless. The less you look like you try or care (even if that couldn’t be further from the truth), the more social status, respect, and honor you gain because you make life appear just that easy. In accordance with this idea, especially in college, it seems that effort is either considered taboo or a race to a never-ending finish line. Even if this is a facade we all recognize — after all, the stereotype of L.A. fake-ness is there for a reason — we still maintain, uphold, and reinforce it. It’s normal to brag about your last-minute study session on the eve of a horrific midterm or final. It’s a typical conversation to discuss how little sleep you get, with the lowest number being a badge of honor. Career-wise, you have to land an impressive internship, but if you cry over the hundreds of rejections or the time invested in every submitted application, that success is nullified. The list goes on.
With this in mind, A.I. has made it easier than ever to be effortless. Still, it’s in that very solution, in that enforcement of our societal standards right now, that poetry will remain irrevocably human, irreplaceable, and a nonnegotiable work of effort to both create and unpack. Not to say that poetry should always feel like some horrible herculean task (it’s really not), but to read or write it, it should take effort. It surely isn’t always going to be a gentle stroll in the park, and if someone tells you it is, they’re selling you something.
A key distinction between poetry and A.I., which ultimately makes the former triumph over the latter, is this: poetry represents humanity’s innate ability to create from nothing. While the ethics of A.I. can be debated, that’s not what this piece is concerned about. Instead, it’s concerned with the affirmation of humanity in poetry, which is not something A.I. can ever replicate, no matter how ‘alive’ it seems. To create poetry is to be alive. It’s to exert effort. It’s to make something out of nothing, no matter how awkward, life-changing, nonsensical, breathtaking, or unexpected it is. This is poetry. And, like it or not, we’re all poets because we all experience this world and create meaning within it.
A.I., on the other hand, will never embody a sense of being alive because it relies on prior knowledge, machine learning, and generalized datasets. Like a metastatic virtual beast, A.I. seems to have no limit, but it does. It’s a tool, and like all tools, it is helpful in the hands of a human and obsolete on its own. Reading and writing poetry is a way for humanity to internalize, externalize, narrate, embody, learn, live, create, try, and fail, yet try again to explain what it means to live in this world. This is why, even as we enter an unprecedented digital age, poetry will never be in actual danger. Because real poetry will never become robotic or artificial, and the second it does, it will cease to be poetry.
When it comes to creative pursuits and the opportunity to contribute to the vast archive of memory our world has, why would we want A.I. (a thing) to replace that expression with a watered-down, worse version? Art — poetry — is how we get through the world. There’s a reason we sing songs at funerals, why we turn to movies and TV shows for comfort. There’s a reason we feel like we’ve been caught stark naked in the rain when a poem hits that one nerve we thought no one else knew existed. And that’s because of its humanity. Sure, not every piece of poetry is spectacular and deserving of a standing ovation, but that’s the beautiful part about it. A superficial, fake, generated poem would not resonate as much as one penned completely free of artificiality. Because to be a poet, to consume poetry, and to be a human is to be real. It’s to be the antithesis of artificial and instead live courageously in the visceral. It’s to make mistakes, it’s to forget when to use the correct comma, it’s to have a sticky note on your desk reminding you what the ABABC rhyme scheme is, or the rules of a sonnet versus a limerick. It’s in those moments, trying and joyful, that we embody a community.
And in those moments, poetry can never, and will never, be taken away from us.