Greetings from Padelford, where we are preparing for the end of another academic year. As always, Spring quarter is a time of celebrations and reflection. We acknowledge and celebrate the awards and accomplishments of our students. We congratulate our graduates and wish them well as they embark on a path toward their future careers and newest achievements. Some of our alumni, as featured in this edition of the newsletter, are now authors and editors. Some have successfully published books of poetry.
I believe that such production – the way our former students have continued to work on their craft beyond graduation – attests to the enduring value of the poetic and literary imagination. It is a space for thought and creativity, and for experiencing the pleasure of living. The late Marvin Bell’s poem, “The 3 Corners of Reality” (1965), declares the need for such space, amidst the ephemeral concerns of everyday life. Should some insistent person – someone who is “very very” – ask about the why and what of creative writing, the poem provides some answers:
“How do you recognize poetry?”
—It looks like poetry.
“How is prose different from poetry?”
—Prose goes by another name.
“Why do you write poetry?”
—Because it feels so good.
That writing should “feel good” suggests something human: the intelligence of our minds and emotions are composed, through myriad rhetorical and formal choices, for the purpose of engaging the minds and emotions of others. Yet, in the twenty-first century, we turned a corner – and it has led us into another reality. In just the matter of the last few years, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become an undeniable part of the terrain of writing instruction and learning. Exploring this territory and navigating it means giving critical consideration to the benefits and drawbacks of using AI tools, and critically assessing why and when such tools are used in the practice of writing.
Such critical assessment, as my colleague Megan Callow suggests, is the work that connects the advent of AI to the ongoing mission of teaching forms of literacy:
I came to understand that critical AI literacy resonates so much with the other kinds of literacies that I’m already teaching. Students are making rhetorical choices when they use these tools. There’s digital literacy involved, and information literacy and media literacy and citation literacy. All of these issues that I’m already passionate about, generative AI is providing new contexts for me to continue those conversations.
The conversations we have with our students about the practice and craft of writing are ongoing. Along the way, we will continue to consider the why and what of writing: For whom do we write? What do attempt to accomplish with our writing? What might our writing enable us and others to do in the world?
The imagination is an expansive space, full of all that our students can envision, and all that we can hope and fear. I think of Kyle Dargan’s poem, “The Robots are Coming” (2015), for the way it explores and renunciates our fantasies of human displacement:
How many times
have we dreamed it this way:
the Age of the Machines,
postindustrial terrors whose
tempered paws—five welded fingers
—wrench back our roofs,
siderophilic tongues seeking blood,
licking the crumbs of us from our beds.
The terrors of displacement have occurred before. Yet, as the evidence of our poetry shows, we’re still here.