Скачать или смотреть Poems and Other Word Machines

Lead Speaker: Seth Perlow (Associate Professor of English, Georgetown University)

Advisors: Deanna Gomez and Samora Sobukwe, NHC Teacher Advisory Council

In 1944, the American poet William Carlos Williams declared that “a poem is a small (or large) machine made of words.” Eighty years later, in our era of large language models, his metaphor sounds more literal; machines can now write poems on their own. To view a poem as a word machine can give us insights into poetry and the other language technologies in our lives. Today’s writing machines raise new uncertainties about many of the values we commonly associate with poetry—about the nature of creativity, authorial intention, self-expression, verbal form, and genre.

In this webinar, we will explore how Williams’s dictum illuminates poetry by Tracy K. Smith, Sally Alatalo, and others writing today. The equation of poem with machine makes even strange, obscure poems more approachable and enjoyable. These poems open new perspectives on familiar debates in literary criticism. What is the relation between tradition and creativity? Which matters more, the wording of a text or what the author meant? Such questions have new urgency as artificial intelligence reshapes how we read and write. This webinar provides educators with texts and topics through which students at all levels can tinker with word machines of many kinds.