Description
Written and edited during the spring and summer of 2022, ‘A New Syntax’ comes from a world untouched by the recent whirlwind of AI innovations. This collection embodies my journey of grief, memories and the break down of memories/ tech/ and ourselves.
In the spring of 2022, I discovered I could not write at all; I was frozen in amber. I joined a chapbook workshop led by Ariel Gore and fellow poets because I felt consumed by grief.
I set a goal to break out of my usual poetic style and structure to create small, experimental poems.
That same summer, my dad passed away. It took me a very long time to finish this project.
I use the metaphors of memory degradation, artificial memory collection, and the notion of how AI would take over the memory collection once I am gone as well. I also employ an extended metaphor of how we need to “reboot” and learn a new language for our framework after experiencing grief.
The AI images in the book were created using early AI technology, which, by today’s standards, was rudimentary. I inputted my poem lines to generate visual representations. This interaction with AI provided a distraction from the pain of grief. Many hours were spent, driven by ADHD energy, exploring the AI’s interpretations of my poems, without providing descriptions of the resulting images. If one day all that remained were these lines and not any tangible memories, I wanted to understand how AI’s interpretation, informed by millions of sources of data, would shape the perception of my words.
For example, these lines were used to create images.
grief is a new program/ I’m lost in the system / awaiting sequence of instructions -from poem IV
examine cached grief/ to reduce network traffic/
trace intersecting ghost wires / volatile memory in danger- from poem VI
I wanted to see how artificial intelligence would interpret my grief and words, understanding that it would analyze data and generate an image that diverged from the memories or thoughts I held when I wrote the lines.
Poems from this collection have recently been published in Beaver Mag and Hip Mama.
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