Deep It Lies
Deep it lies
Buried (for now)
Crouched below, but poised
To spring; the fury of a thing
With feathers robbed of wings
“The world isn’t fair,” you said,
Hinting at the rightness of iniquity.
“It’s a dog-eat-dog world.”
That might have been my first clue:
I never saw a dog eat dogs.
But I saw men kill
Rape
Lie
Steal
They beat devoted dogs for less.
Tossed them in black bags,
For their lap-licking loyalty.
Disappeared them in the trash on Wednesdays,
Subtly warning
Smoldering silence.
Ask not for whom
The roar of the incinerator burns:
It burns for you.
— Holly Jahangiri (April 4, 2023)
Amusing aside: While I’m all for private platforms enforcing community standards, I had to laugh at Midjourney, this morning – I have a paid account, and privately fed this poem to the bot, wondering what it might propose as a featured image. I immediately got this warning:
What a world, where rapists are protected but poetry mentioning “rape” gets the author the threat of a permanent ban. Maybe that screenshot ought to be the featured image.
Todays Poets
Only in Russia is poetry respected—it gets people killed. Is there anywhere else where poetry is so common a motive for murder?
— Osip Mandelstam
Boris Dralyuk – a Ukrainian-American writer, editor and translator who currently teaches in the English Department at the University of Tulsa (my alma mater!) He has taught Russian literature at his alma mater and at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. Executive editor and editor-in-chief of the Los Angeles Review of Books and managing editor of Cardinal Points. Read more here.
Boris Dralyuk | Light (lightpoetrymagazine.com)
In L.A. poetry fights Putin (forward.com)
Short Conversations with Poets: Boris Dralyuk – McSweeney’s Internet Tendency (mcsweeneys.net)
Paul Laurence Dunbar – born on June 27, 1872 to two formerly enslaved people from Kentucky, Paul Laurence Dunbar became one of the first influential Black poets in American literature. Dunbar’s poetry is a depiction of Black life in turn-of-the-century America. Read more here.
The Haunted Oak by Paul Laurence Dunbar | Poetry Foundation
April is National Poetry Month. This year marks its 27th year. NaPoWriMo – 30 days of writing poems – is poets’ answer to National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo).
This coincides with the A to Z Blogging Challenge, now celebrating its 13th anniversary. Some participants choose a theme; others wing it. Doesn’t matter! The real challenge is to build a practice of writing daily. I think I stuck with it…once. There’s still time to sign up – registration ends April 9. You can see the list of participants – I’m sure they’d love it if you’d visit and comment on their blogs.
This month, my goal is to:
- Write a poem a day and share it – uncurated – here; and
- Highlight some poets you may be unfamiliar with.
I encourage you to click the links to read about them and their work. I plan to choose a diverse array of classical and contemporary poets – indigenous poets, Black poets, women poets, LGBTQ poets – that challenge us to see the world differently while also tapping into universal themes and emotions.
Remember, too, that comments and conversation are always welcome here. (Spammers, on the other hand, will be tossed into the moat or mocked, so before you leave an irrelevant comment or drop a link, consider that it’s fair game!)
Good grief. The randomness of the algorithm strikes again (sounds like a Google Slap!) I didn’t know you fed your poems to Midjourney. That is interesting. Do you always, or do you sometimes have an image in mind that you want to coax of the beast?
Cheers,
Mitch
Oh, I usually craft the prompt more carefully! Midjourney occasionally surprises and delights me with what it does with random or abstract ideas, so now and then it’s worth running a poem or question through the the image mangler just trip see what happens. Obviously, “rape” is a banned word, but I wasn’t expecting to get threatened again after I removed it!
That’s interesting, about Midjourney. I would have liked to see it’s image. Sigh.
The featured images this month (to the best of my ability) are from Midjourney. It just didn’t like my poem as a prompt. The thing is, I 100% understand why “rape” is a bad idea to feed to an image generator. It is the definition of amoral and doesn’t really “understand” context. But the threat of a PERMANENT ban came AFTER I removed “sensitive” words and posted the poem in the prompt. Pretty weird – and it threw me into a 3-minute time out and told me I was being “manually reviewed.” I don’t think that’s even possible over there – not within 3 minutes.
Ironically, another user and I realized that it thinks “curvaceous” or “plus-sized” or even “size 18” mermaids look like gigantic walrus-women and that it actually has no trouble producing topless women – with nipples! – despite the most innocent of prompts that don’t even mention breasts at all. So it seems biased in favor of immature men, despite being (near as we can figure) run by some.
I’m sympathetic to the difficulties of moderating AI generated content and the operators’ desire NOT to allow it to be used to create porn, gore, or disturbing violent images. But the genie is out of the bottle, so it may be better just to AI-moderate the metadata and not allow those images to be shared on-site or displayed in their own galleries. Ban users who repeatedly abuse it to create such images, but don’t ban the entire dictionary – seems the AI moderation tools haven’t caught up with the AI image-and-text generation tools.
Your words need to be shared so i took them to Twitter.
How easy writing seems to come to you.
The info is also stellar. You put in a lot of research. Im impressed and grateful for all of it. Thanks.
As for dealing with robots for generated pics, i don’t go there.
Thanks Holly. Keep going my friend.
Aw, you’re very kind, Selma. Thank you! I no longer have a Twitter account, so thank you for sharing it there for me. I enjoy Midjourney, but I would never use it to replace a professional graphic artist or photographer. It’s good for quick images that express what I’m trying to convey in my text – they have an almost dreamlike/nightmarish quality, don’t they? But I only use it to replace or supplement ME – or otherwise “free” images (which are sometimes less trustworthy).
When it comes to AI, there are lawsuits by Getty Images and other creatives, and I think that to the extent that they can prove their copyrighted images were used without consent and remain recognizable, they ought to win. My real objection is that images and text were Hoovered up by these companies and used as training sets to develop a for-profit product, but that the artists and writers weren’t paid and aren’t compensated out of the profits. And they should be, even if it’s just a pittance. It’s not necessarily a copyright issue, or maybe all writers could be sued for ripping off a dictionary, all artists for using other art for inspiration and learning. (I have a friend whose portrait of Kandinsky in the style of Kandinsky was stolen and used on a brochure for an art gallery that was doing an exhibit of Kandinsky’s art – he wasn’t sure whether to be incredibly flattered that they credited it TO Kandinsky or go after them for copyright violation.)
“It’s not necessarily a copyright issue, or maybe all writers could be sued for ripping off a dictionary, all artists for using other art for inspiration and learning.”
Don’t give Webster any ideas!
The speech thingie nearly made me jump out of my chair when I highlighted this sentence. LOL
I’m kind of thinking I should remove the speech thingy. Gets me every time, too – in fact, it’s the reason for the mute-button thiny I pushed on my keyboard. But then I think Mitch M. likes it. Even added it to his blog. I have very ambivalent feelings about that “speech thingy.”