Greetings from the UW’s Seattle campus. It’s springtime after cherry-blossom season. Starting in mid-March, 90-year-old cherry trees on the Quad sprout tiny pink buds. Anticipation builds; thousands of spectators from the campus and beyond look forward to a future they know is coming. And then one week later, the future arrives: 29 trees burst into pink-white bloom. The Quad is transformed. People dress in their graduation-wedding-day-family-photo best to have their pictures taken with the cherry blossoms. Students-faculty-staff wander through the Quad to take it all in. For a brief moment in time, the future we knew was coming – the arrival of cherry blossoms – meets us in all of its pink-white splendor in the Quad. And then it rains days later and the flowers are gone.
What if the future is here in the present (albeit fleetingly), awaiting our engagement? It meets us in any space we create to imagine what is possible now. One such space takes the form of a research cluster that faculty in the Program for Writing Across Campus (PWAC) – Megan Callow, Calvin Pollak, and Ben Wirth – lead, entitled, “A Classroom-Centered Inquiry into Generative AI, Large Language Models, and Writing Praxis.” In this year-long project, the group focuses on the future that generative AI technologies is currently shaping, particularly when it comes to how we teach writing. Both anticipating and confronting the challenges that these technologies present for writing instruction, this research cluster is developing a toolkit to help instructors navigate change. The future and present of AI is full of concerns and innovative possibilities. The group explores the latter in its upcoming Hackathon event, which explores ways to teach with large language models (LLMs).
The future could also be what is suspended in language – the distance between the words on the page and what happens when they reach you. This year, Irish poet and host of the podcast Poetry Unbound, Pádraig Ó Tuama, gave the 8th Annual Lee Scheingold Lecture on Poetry and Poetics entitled, “You: The Lyric Address in Poetry.” In his meditation of the shifting expectations that motivate poetic speech directed at you, Ó Tuama illustrated a few encounters with absence. You might come into being as an engagingly vital emptiness, a space to seek what we do not know (yet) and to explore what currently lives in the void. Consider an affirmation of this in an excerpt from Paul Celan’s “Psalm” (1961):
A Nothing
we were, are now, and ever
shall be, blooming:
the Nothing-, the
No-One’s-Rose.
In this poem, the past-present-future of “blooming” can exist in the shared condition of “Nothing.” The possibility of a Nothing always ever in bloom is one example of how poetry allows us to explore the wide range of human experience. In a different way, generative AI may do the same.
As our PWAC faculty and Ó Tuama’s lecture show, the teaching and poetics of writing make claims to a future that is already here. While my PWAC colleagues envision what writing pedagogy will become as a result of generative AI, another colleague of ours – John Webster – has retired after 53 years at the University of Washington. During his long career, Professor Webster has taken on key leadership roles in writing education: he served as the director of what is now the Program of Writing and Rhetoric (PWR), the Director of Writing in the College of Arts and Sciences, and the director of English 108 in what is now College Edge. I am grateful for his many years of service and dedication to our educational mission.
After the cherry blossoms, we are left with the ordinary wonder of spring. Winter is over. The present is a promise, unfurling like new green leaves. The blossoms appear for a brief moment in time, but the 90-year-old trees are still here. Let’s hope for another season of bloom.