«Summer Kitchen»
by Donald Hall
In June’s high light she stood at the sink
With a glass of wine,
And listened for the bobolink,
And crushed garlic in late sunshine.
I watched her cooking, from my chair.
She pressed her lips
Together, reached for kitchenware,
And tasted sauce from her fingertips.
«It’s ready now. Come on,» she said.
«You light the candle.»
We ate, and talked, and went to bed,
And slept. It was a miracle.
Don’t stuff your fingers
in your ears or count the Pentecost.
Don’t ask if that grammar has a rosary
or recipe written in cornrows on her head.
A mythical village filled with echoes
of talking drums from Ibadan,
or the sweet potatoes that root
as some still dream of planting yams?
The musk of a hand carved mask,
or a funky lover feeling bituminous?
Could you spot it perhaps on the spectrum?
Do y’all hum or alhamdulillah?
O Lorde—do we decide to star it or tar it
as others have tried to find asphalt
in our absence of photons or perhaps
recite [carbon & oxygen & aluminum]
tho not as a ploy of blaxploitation
where most of the kinks got afro-picked out
and what was left only looked like a globe.
Or a melanite halo if some hot Mama needs
to braid or lay her baby hair for miles ahead
with [boron & lanthanum & carbon
& potassium & neon & sulfur & sulphur].
The elemental truth is—some may never know.
And yet, don’t we still whisper to cross it
as if fingers or streets or an ocean
—to seek a return to the orishas tho
I often think they overhear.
So what. Don’t stuff your fingers
in your ears or count the Pentecost.
Don’t ask if that grammar has a rosary
or recipe written in cornrows on her head.
Instead, address a question of the talking drum
—in what dream of eggshell shoes
could these midnight blues even indigo?
An Idea of Improvisation for Violin and Viola
(after Hilary Hahn)
Like if
one of our fingers
tries to cause a slide
or fall in pitch
to rise into a query
or they seek
to caress or pinch
a fret until certain sounds
begin to unpeel
from two citrus bodies
—say a blood or
navel orange—
but not a sound
as in long passage
connecting two bodies
of water below
a duvet of darkness
or waves from
a beloved’s lips
in the leaps
of a ghazal
alongside the sea
of a secret which
—when you toss
your hair that way—
seems to flicker like
what in better light
some might call
abandon.
But perhaps,
perhaps, as if
somehow tonight
—as orange petals
warm the air
above a wick—
we sit close beside
a Trouble Clef
which even as
it knows it shouldn’t
begins to curl
into a silk scarf of sigh
—pianissimo as violets—
to perhaps warn
a bare stretch of arm
or thigh or neck
of what surely lies
beneath certain muscles
which may or may not
mimic a blood or
navel orange’s
quiet tremble—
as if only until dawn,
as if only until taken
or mistaken for
something which
—in flickering light—
could seem prone to rise or fall
like a lip of chrysanthemum
on a ridge of collarbone.
BOSTON REVIEW
Joy Harjo is one of the most respected poets in the United States. A member of the Muscogee Nation, in 2019, she became thefirst Native American to be named the Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, commonly referred to as the United States Poet Laureate. She renewed this honor twice, holding it until 2022. Other writers who have held the title include Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Frost, Nobel Prize winners Louise Glück and Joseph Brodsky, as well the incumbent, Ada Limón.
In addition to being a poet, Harjo is a saxophonist, singer, artist and playwright. She has collected her memories of an intense life in two volumes of memoirs: Crazy Brave (2012) and Poet Warrior (2021). Her existential journey led her to live in various states — including New Mexico, Iowa, Arizona, California, Hawaii, Colorado and Tennessee — before she returned to Tulsa, Oklahoma, where she was born in 1951. She grew up there under the shadow of an abusive father, before leaving for university in Santa Fe. There, she discovered her literary calling.
Harjo is the author of 10 collections of poetry and a handful of children’s books, non-fiction titles and plays. She has also published seven musical albums. In October, she received the National Medal of Arts from President Joe Biden in a private ceremony at the White House. A couple of weeks later, Biden traveled to Arizona to offer an apology for the federally-run boarding school system that, for decades, tore Indigenous children and young people away from their families. These youths were held in facilities where their customs and languages were prohibited, in order to assimilate them into the dominant white culture.
Question. How would you define the place of Native Americans in American society?
Answer. It’s a complicated space, although things have changed a lot since I came into this world. Racism and a caste system that organizes society based on money persist. But sometimes, generations bring about change… and sometimes, those changes are destroyed by those who want to maintain power or maintain their greedy structures.
Q. Was it easy for you to have your voice heard when you started writing poetry in the mid-1970s?
A. As Natives, we’ve always been at the mercy of waves of recognition from the “other.” I was fortunate to study at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, which was a liberal arts school that was at the center of a cultural movement. After the occupation of Alcatraz [which lasted 18 months, between 1969 and 1971] and the explosion of the Native rights movements, one of those waves of recognition was generated. Then, attention came back to us after Wounded Knee [the 1973 takeover of the town of the same name in South Dakota by activists from the American Indian Movement]. Years later, it was Standing Rock [the 2016 protest against the construction of an oil pipeline in Sioux territory in North Dakota].
It always happens like this: a certain recognition comes along, and then, we’re forgotten for a while. In 2020, the Supreme Court ruling [which ruled that almost the entire eastern half of Oklahoma is Indigenous territory] was key, as was the[murder of] George Floyd. In recent years, there have been advances in the cultural field: the series Reservation Dogs, the Oscar nomination for actress Lily Gladstone, my consideration as poet laureate…
This time around, I think the attention will persist, because Native Americans are intrinsically linked to what it means to be American.
Q. Where do you see the country heading?
A. I’m a child of the civil rights era. I fought for the rights of Indigenous peoples, I grew up surrounded by poets and thinkers from the Chicano movement and all the others who fought to change things. Seeing women’s rights being dismantled now saddens me. It makes me think that we’re at a crossroads. And not just in this country, because the whole world is connected to each other, we’re all connected to what it means to be human. Global warming, economic systems that stopped taking care of us and only looked after the rich... we’re watching a major shift go down.
Q. Some of the historical Native leaders inspired the emergence of the environmental movement that’s currently being led by the youth.
A. You don’t have to go back to the wisdom of our ancestors to understand that it’s not a good idea to take from nature more than you’re going to use. You have to act with respect. The land doesn’t belong to you. We’re just its stewards. We live in a world dominated by a power system that behaves in a greedy way, that digs and digs and destroys river ecosystems, fisheries and everything else. It’s gone too far. There’s a delicate balance in this world, and it must be preserved. Animals, plants, insects, human beings, rain, mountains… we’re all part of a bigger story. When we act without respect, there are consequences.
Q. Did you enjoy Killers of the Flower Moon, Martin Scorsese’s latest film?
A. Yes and no. I don’t think it’s my place to be a film critic. Let’s just say that it’s an important film, but at the same time, it’s the classic film dealing with Native American issues, when the main characters aren’t Native Americans.
Q. Was the plundering of the Osage Nation— which is described in the movie — an incident that was sufficiently well-known among Native Americans?
A. Among us, yes. The same thing happened in our Muskogee Nation [both are in the state of Oklahoma]. Part of the land my family was allotted turned out to contain one of the largest oil fields in the world. They say it was like a lake of oil. My great-grandparents were millionaires, and my grandfather was the first to own a car. When my father died and we inherited his oil shares, they were worth about $30 a share. Then, they sent us a letter and told us that those mineral rights had been sold. I’ve never looked into it enough, but clearly there was a lot of corruption. There were murders here, too. And one woman — who was one of the richest women in the world — was given a legal guardian, because at the time, if you were a fullblood Native, it was thought that you didn’t have the capacity to take care of your land.
Q. When did you know you would be a poet?
A. As a child, I didn’t aspire to be one, because I didn’t know that Natives could do that. Painting was a possibility, because my grandmother painted. I didn’t decide to write until college, when I started hanging out with other poets. That’s when poetry took hold of me.
I was a single mother with two children. How was I going to make a living? But that didn’t matter: once it took hold of me, I didn’t do anything else. In the end, luckily, I managed.
Q. One of your first dreams was about Emily Dickinson. You’ve written that you identified with her idea of being a nobody.
A. I really liked Dickinson as a child. I still love her. She was an original poet. That’s something I’ve always sought, in writing or in music: not to look like anybody else.
Q. Over the years, you became a somebody. In 2019, you were named the United States Poet Laureate.
A. You don’t dedicate yourself to poetry to achieve something like that. You do it because it’s what moves you. Poetry gives you something. For me, it isn’t limited to books. Rather, it’s an art connected to music and dance.
Recognition was never easy for Native writers. When I was in college, I remember going to look for N. Scott Momaday’s novel that won the Pulitzer Prize [House Made of Dawn in 1968]. And seeing that it wasn’t in the literature section, but in the anthropology section, we were often pigeonholed into non-literary categories.
It was a surprise when I got the call about the award. I thought I was being called by the Library of Congress to participate in a festival they organize in the summer every year. By then, I already had an audience. That’s when the recognition came.
Q. What role does poetry play in Native communities?
A. I’ve traveled around the world, and I’ve been able to see that poetry is more central in other societies than in the American one. During the pandemic, however, people sought refuge in poetry, in the same way that we turn to it in the special moments of our lives. Many of my classmates at art school were less than a generation away from what we call the “generation of orality.” That includes an awareness of the power of orality. Poetry is part of that. Some of that has been lost with the digital revolution.
“Oh, how I revel in this world, this life that we are given / This tapestry of experiences, that shapes us into living / And though I may depart, my spirit will still sing / The song of life eternal, that flows through everything.” These are the opening lines of a poem generated by ChatGPT 3.5 in the style of Walt Whitman. This poem was presented to a panel of nearly 700 people with no specialized knowledge of poetry, who were asked to choose between classic English poems and poems produced by AI in a matter of seconds.
A new study, published in Scientific Reports,compares dozens of poems generated by ChatGPT to those written by classic English poets, from Chaucer and Shakespeare to T.S. Eliot, Sylvia Plath, Emily Dickinson, and Allen Ginsberg. The researchers conducted two experiments: one asked participants to determine whether a poem was written by a human or AI, and the other assessed the quality of the poems. In both cases, the AI-generated poems either passed as human-written or even outperformed their human counterparts. Notably, the researchers did not select the “best” poem written by ChatGPT, but rather chose the first result.
So, how did this happen? The simple answer is that poetry is inherently difficult to interpret, and the reading group preferred poems that were more accessible, which they mistakenly associated with human authorship.
“The results suggest that the average reader prefers poems that are easier to understand and that they can understand,” says Brian Porter, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh and co-author of the study. The panel seemed to interpret complex verses by poets like T.S. Eliot as “hallucinations,” dismissing them as impossible to have been written by humans. The five highest-rated poems were all generated by AI, while the lowest-rated poems were human-written.
“Some participants explained that the emotional content of a poem was a sign that it was written by a human,” explains Porter, although these poems were actually produced by ChatGPT. “Others seem to interpret confusing or difficult lines as AI errors, rather than intentional choices by a poet. The results suggest that people take liking a poem as a sign that it was written by a human, rather than an AI.”
The study’s focus, however, was not on people’s ability to distinguish between English-language classics and AI-generated poems, but on how well AI can mimic human writing. In this, AI succeeded: “The main takeaway from the experiment is that AI is capable of creating poems that convey emotions and ideas in a way that convincingly resembles human authorship,” Porter states.
Would a group of critics, academics, or poetry experts have given more precise answers? A group of Spanish academics already asked this question. Collaborating with Argentine writer Patricio Pron, they competed with AI-generated stories and had them judged by a small panel of critics. The human writer won: “The difference between critics and casual readers is immense,” says Julio Gonzalo, a professor at Spain’s UNED university and author of this study.
“AI is easy to confuse non-experts,” says Guillermo Marco, a UNED researcher and poet, and co-author of the work with Pron. “We reach a conclusion that we may already have known, but it is very good to have measured it: a well-designed blockbuster with big data can have a better chance of success than something more risky,” Marco adds.
Working with Patricio Pron had the advantage of using new, original stories. The researchers acknowledge the challenge in conducting a similar study with experts on classic poems. “We suspect that a group of poetry experts could do it better, and we plan to try it soon, but that means finding classic poems that poetry experts do not immediately recognize, which is quite difficult,” says Porter.
Interestingly, when participants were informed that a poem was AI-generated, they automatically liked it less. This reaction may reflect human skepticism toward machine-generated art, a trend Porter doesn’t think will disappear anytime soon: “I’m not sure people will ever fully accept AI-generated poetry — or even AI-generated art in general. Language is often a tool for one person to communicate ideas to another, and AI, at its core, is just mimicking that.”
In their latest article, Gonzalo and Marco show that machines don’t need extraordinary capabilities to outperform human judgment when evaluating creative texts. Even a small language model with 500 million parameters (compared to the 175 billion parameters of newer versions of ChatGPT) was enough to pass most of the criteria for a common reader with flying colors. “With these experiments, we delve into questions more related to sociology and aesthetics — about how taste is shaped by society or education,” Marco explains. “It’s difficult to judge art without sufficient prior experience,” he adds.
Marco is more blunt about the limits of AI’s ability to create artistic experiences: “Art is about communicating human experience. AI is a very, very powerful tool, but it will end up becoming like an autotune for creativity. It will never be autonomous nor have the need to express itself unless given instructions.”
This success of AI over human judgment has prompted the researchers to consider whether there should be regulation requiring clear warnings when content is generated by AI. “If readers value AI-generated texts less, and there is no warning that AI-generated text is being used, there’s a risk that people may be misled into paying for something they would not have accepted had they known it involved AI-generated text or art,” says Porter.
An émigré player’s artistry sings through a London street, rising over many barriers
The Kurdish Musician
She is swaddled in pink, sky-blue and veiled
in a gold hejab that with every chime
of her santoor dangles its fringe where trailed
on her cheeks hang coins that bob in time
to her nods, throb in a pause, sway to tremor
and echo. Poised on thumbs, twin hammers mime
a flurry of wings, two thin furred tongues that stammer
at strings, streaming a swarm of rising notes
not through field and hedgerow, blossom and clover,
but through space and stars to the huge black throats
of gully and scarp where all music is stilled,
hived in a dome, as she is, rapt, remote,
impervious to the here and now, hands filled
with flightpaths winging home. Through her who knows
what trails might meet or where pollen has spilled
strange hybrids take, scrub thrive or desert rose;
groundcover prove alive, on five dark grounds
now train its greening shoots? Or who’d suppose
in a London sky, pink, sky-blue, that has wound
itself in the sun’s hejab, in fold on fold
veiled its own dark grounds, she too could be found,
head in the clouds, while ours are fringed with gold?
***
From a fine Collected Poems representing all Mimi Khalvati’s major publications from 1991 to 2019, The Kurdish Musician represents that mysteriously timeless realm of all the best “Collecteds”, the selection of undated poems never previously included in a book.
Khalvati’s poetic achievement, recently recognised by the award of the King’s gold medal, has been shaped by her profound imaginative relationship with her home country of Iran. The musician in the poem is a kindred spirit; exiled from the neighbouring regions of western Asia that comprise Kurdistan, she transfigures her own loss into re-possession, and makes a gift of her presence to those under the “London sky” who witness her artistry.
The instrument the woman is playing is a hammered dulcimer, its tonal complexity suggested by the terza rima weave of the verse-form the poet has chosen. The woman’s relationship to her instrument is evoked by the keenly observed rhythmical movements of her body, while the soft organic colours of her clothes, “gold”, “pink” and “sky-blue”, harmonise her with the sunset. The hammers she wields both “mime / a flurry of wings” and are “two thin furred tongues”. The tongues “stammer at strings” in a flickering movement which is nevertheless productive, “streaming a swarm of rising notes” – finally bringing wings and tongues together, and suggesting birdsong. This is birdsong with resonance beyond English pastoral, however; the music bypasses “field and hedgerow” with their seasonal markers of spring blossom and summer clover. It ascends “through space and stars” and its reach seems both topological and cosmic. The “huge black throats / of gully and scarp where all music is stilled” seem to indicate a partly metaphysical space which is not only the musician’s mountainous homeland but an ideal realm above the earth. The interplay of images comes briefly to rest in the idea of absolute mental concentration (another way of being “hived in a dome”) and the still-active culmination of the “flight” metaphor in the beautifully imagined “hands filled / with flightpaths winging home”. The musician is “remote” from her surroundings, but fully present to the music and the double sense of location it sets free.
Now the focus is literally brought down to earth to be re-grounded in its subsoil. The vitality of multidirectional movement expresses itself through the pollination and proliferation of plants, perhaps to produce “strange hybrids” or basic but essential “scrub” and “groundcover”. The metaphorical landscape is tightened by questions, the first concerning what “trails” may have accrued from the musician’s trials of emigration. Perhaps the “five dark grounds” represent areas geologically inhospitable to life, and there may be implications of the politically “dark grounds” which the welcoming sky veils in “the sun’s hejab”. The final question affirms the arrival of the musician as enrichment and challenges negatives of exile and emigration: “… who’d suppose… she too could be found, / head in the clouds while ours are fringed in gold?” The delicacy and versatility of words such as “fringe”, “trail” and “veil” heighten an impression of what we might call, narrow-mindedly, other-worldliness, but the poem knows that the musician’s seemingly transcendental power is earthed. Like the sun she touches the heads of the gathered crowd with gold.
