“I Asked the Chatbot to Write about a Lighthouse, but It Generated Lies” by Pamela Lucinda MossPosted by Rattle
Image: “Lighthouse at the Edge of the World” by G.G. Silverman. “I Asked the Chatbot to Write about a Lighthouse, but It Generated Lies” was written by Pamela Lucinda Moss for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, March 2023, and selected as the Artist’s Choice. (PDF / JPG)
__________
Pamela Lucinda Moss
I ASKED THE CHATBOT TO WRITE ABOUT A LIGHTHOUSE, BUT IT GENERATED LIES
You need to be human to know about lighthouses.
You need to know what it feels like to wait in the dark for your teenager to come home, with your weighted blanket and your dachshund stretched long against your side, your brain spinning with worry, flashing beams of fear into the blackness of your bedroom.
You need to feel old. You need to mis-hear things, mis-state things. Mess up the arithmetic when you add a tip to your check at the 65th Street Diner. Write a note to your kid that says: You rip what you sew. Write in your journal: I am in the throws of motherhood.
You need to feel fear and rigidity as you stand on your metaphorical windy promontory, poised at the point where land and sea and the rest of your life meet, but maybe not so much fear that you write reviews like: This book is too pointy. When my toddler fell on this book, he scraped his cheek. I give it one star.
You need to know about being alone, about reaching into a popcorn bag in a second-run movie theater and never touching other fingers. When the movie ends, you walk through the doors into the audacity of so much sky, so much light. A flyer on a telephone pole reads: Do you miss singing? You take a picture of it, and the possibility of joining a choir recedes into the vastness of your camera roll, along with pictures of stray cats, of recipes you’ve never cooked, of your bare toes on sand on the first day of spring when there was light on the water and so much joy, spinning and shining from the tall, round room of your heart.
Comment from the artist, G.G. Silverman: “The humor in the title grabbed my attention (I laughed out loud—well done!), then the poem took me on a gut-felt emotional journey, where the reader lives the mother’s anguish for her child’s well-being via wonderfully immersive, scenic lighthouse metaphors. I love how the imagery in the poem takes on a sensuous, dreamy blur toward the end, and we, as readers, become the lighthouse itself.”
Andre D. Underwood: “I started writing poems back in 2005, because I needed a positive way to express my emotions. So I started channeling how I feel about everything. I channeled the pain, the happiness, the love, the disgust, the fear, and the joy. I wrote about girlfriends, my mom, my brother, my father, my sister, my baby mothers, my enemies, my friends … I even wrote about nature. Poetry is my outlet for my emotions, my freedom of expression—a place where I’m not bound by anything but free to spill my thoughts without consequences.”
“After the Death of Cormac McCarthy …” by Dante Di StefanoPosted by Rattle
Dante Di Stefano
AFTER THE DEATH OF CORMAC MCCARTHY, I LOOK AT THE LOCUST TREE OUT MY CLASSROOM WINDOW AND TRY TO EXPLAIN THE VIOLENCE AT THE HEART OF THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE TO MY CHILDREN IN THE MANNER OF AN ERIC CARLE BOOK
Over there, there is a green thing in the way,
under the silver of the moon that isn’t shining
because it is the daytime, and on its many arms,
there are so many thorns you could call it a coat,
a thorn coat, and there is always someone climbing
its trunk and hurting their hands so much so.
A little boy is climbing and a little girl is climbing
and with them the ghosts of their dead grandparents
and their unborn children’s children and a caterpillar
who only knows how to eat and eat, thorn and leaf,
on the way to becoming a butterfly and a brown bear
and a goldfish out of water flopping upward
and a wolf pup and a lion cub and an eagle without
a nest and you and me and every mother and father
and son and daughter who ever was—we are all
climbing and climbing and climbing until our hands
ache and ache and ache and make a cradle of that ache
and hang a lullaby in the air above that cradle
and we are all going up and up and up and it is
painful and strange because we are all also falling
down and down and down, deeper than the deepest
part of the ocean, which is singing to us in the way
a humpback whale does or in the way the waves
sing to the shore and if you listen very closely,
you can hear a great great writer whispering
to the waves in us and the trees in us and the thorns
and all that climbing and all those cut palms
and bleeding fingers. Listen. He is ending his book.
He is ending the great book of his life. He has no
say in this, but he is saying on the last page: fly them.
Dante Di Stefano: “Cormac McCarthy is one of my favorite novelists. I wrote this thinking about his death this week and the ways in which McCarthy’s books have helped me understand our nation’s romance with brutality. I was also thinking about how I might explain some of this to my small children. I’ve read The Hungry Caterpillar and Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? a thousand times in the past five years. In Carle’s books the world in all its wonder unfolds. I thought it would be interesting to look at McCarthy’s grim fatalistic view of human nature through the lens of Carle’s imagination. The last two words of the poem are the last two words of my favorite McCarthy novel, Suttree.”
Cindy Veach: “I believe that memories choose us and not the other way around. This poem braids together three memories that refused to leave me alone. I felt intense guilt and shame about each one of these memories and, true to the poem’s title, never shared them with anyone.” (web)
Abby E. Murray: “I was talking to a friend the other night about how, whenever anything painful or sad happens on a national scale in Britain, there’s a part of me that is, for a fraction of a second, surprised—like I’ve grown to expect ineptitude and blatant disregard for humanity in the U.S., and seeing it in Britain is about as unsettling as seeing my mother drunk (which is, for the record, about as likely as me seeing the Queen herself show up at my house in the wee hours, blitzed). Even heat waves brought about by man-made climate change, which affect us all, are being spoken about as wholly unanticipated in Britain. So I’m kind of making fun of my sense of problematic surprise, even as I move to correct it.” (web)
Alexis V. Jackson: “Song and scent, for me, are the strongest connections to memory. My mother taught me how to remember things with song and verse; so, I’m conditioned to connect hymns and rap verses to blood memory and lived experiences. This poem is about what we see M. NourbeSe Philip ‘exaqua[s]’ in Zong, what Philip and Ping invited me to do with language and memory, what my mother has conditioned me to do, what conversations with water about their memory looks like.” (web)
