The poems were inspired by conversations with the artist, Evie Chapman. The poems, in turn, inspired Evie Chapman’s artwork.
AI
For Evie Chapman
Not ‘artificial insemination’, nor
a cry of dismay or woe, nor a
two letter word approved by Scrabble,
nor a three-toed sloth from the Guianas,
but ‘artificial intelligence’.
***
I set the computer on my exercise
bike – with its read-only-memory –
and, as I pedal nowhere in the study,
sometimes to engage my mind on the journey
I pick a book at random from the shelves.
Today it is THE FACT OF A DOORFRAME,
Adrienne Rich’s selected poems.
Again at random, I access it
at page forty six. Helpfully the poem,
entitled ‘Artificial Intelligence’,
is dated: 1961. The poet
has been bested at chess by a computer.
‘I’m sulking,’ she says, ‘in the great tradition
of human waste’ and, deliberately,
personifies the ‘digital’ machine,
addressing it directly: ‘…denied
our luxury of nausea, you
forget nothing, have no dreams’.
***
We live much of our lives in metaphor,
frequently when ‘the tables have been turned’
and life becomes ‘an uphill battle’.
We often like to think ‘the grass is
always greener on the other side’,
especially after ‘it’s been raining
cats and dogs’. ‘Artificial intelligence’
was ‘coined’, yes, in that great tradition –
by USA computer scientists
nearly seventy years ago. So
why the current razzmatazz, the last ten year’s
of increasingly noisy razzle-dazzle,
about what AI will do for us
or to us now, as if it were some
recently arrived sentient being,
a software Golem come to redeem us,
a binary Godzilla bringing
the end of days – not something that needs
the electricity to be switched on
to work? Maybe somebody somewhere
is looking to make a fortune or two
out of our gullibility – yesterday’s
news become today’s snake oil?
REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST
For Evie Chapman
Now that I have been summoned to bear witness
to the ‘swinging sixties’, a decade
half my lifetime away – when Liverpool,
according to the poet, Allen Ginsberg,
was the centre of ‘the human universe’,
when the empires of the USA
and the Soviet Union curtailed
the lives of millions, and raced, like small boys,
to be the very first men in the moon –
I shall make some notes in order to
blow the dust off the archived albums
of my memories: I was 17
when it began, a high school student,
and a poet, and 27
when it ended, husband, father, teacher,
property owner, and still a poet;
from adolescence to adulthood,
from dependence to independence,
in ten long sometimes joyful, sometimes
unsteady steps; from falling in love
with a pretty girl, and staying in love;
from youthful insouciance to the pride
and awe at having a daughter; commonplace
wonders, shaping futures.
GRAPHICS: ©Evie Chapman 2024
By David Selzer