“I Asked the Chatbot to Write about a Lighthouse, but It Generated Lies” by Pamela Lucinda MossPosted by Rattle
Image: “Lighthouse at the Edge of the World” by G.G. Silverman. “I Asked the Chatbot to Write about a Lighthouse, but It Generated Lies” was written by Pamela Lucinda Moss for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, March 2023, and selected as the Artist’s Choice. (PDF / JPG)
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Pamela Lucinda Moss
I ASKED THE CHATBOT TO WRITE ABOUT A LIGHTHOUSE, BUT IT GENERATED LIES
You need to be human to know about lighthouses.
You need to know what it feels like to wait in the dark for your teenager to come home, with your weighted blanket and your dachshund stretched long against your side, your brain spinning with worry, flashing beams of fear into the blackness of your bedroom.
You need to feel old. You need to mis-hear things, mis-state things. Mess up the arithmetic when you add a tip to your check at the 65th Street Diner. Write a note to your kid that says: You rip what you sew. Write in your journal: I am in the throws of motherhood.
You need to feel fear and rigidity as you stand on your metaphorical windy promontory, poised at the point where land and sea and the rest of your life meet, but maybe not so much fear that you write reviews like: This book is too pointy. When my toddler fell on this book, he scraped his cheek. I give it one star.
You need to know about being alone, about reaching into a popcorn bag in a second-run movie theater and never touching other fingers. When the movie ends, you walk through the doors into the audacity of so much sky, so much light. A flyer on a telephone pole reads: Do you miss singing? You take a picture of it, and the possibility of joining a choir recedes into the vastness of your camera roll, along with pictures of stray cats, of recipes you’ve never cooked, of your bare toes on sand on the first day of spring when there was light on the water and so much joy, spinning and shining from the tall, round room of your heart.
Comment from the artist, G.G. Silverman: “The humor in the title grabbed my attention (I laughed out loud—well done!), then the poem took me on a gut-felt emotional journey, where the reader lives the mother’s anguish for her child’s well-being via wonderfully immersive, scenic lighthouse metaphors. I love how the imagery in the poem takes on a sensuous, dreamy blur toward the end, and we, as readers, become the lighthouse itself.”
Maeve McKenna: “I have been writing poetry since I was a child. In the Dublin suburb where I grew up, life was about surviving and the idea you could become anything other than a worker seemed fanciful, and so, I wrote poetry in secret for most of my life and dreamed of one day being ‘a poet.’ Many of my poems allude to my childhood years, a deeply traumatic time of revelations and change for the Irish nation. I now write without fear, old enough to be at peace where I find myself these days, living a quiet life in rural Ireland and allowing nature to be the new inspiration in telling the stories I still need to tell.” (web)
Peter Krass: “With my own poems superbly insulating a couple of desk drawers, I couldn’t help but notice how my favorite literary journals were being dominated by just a few well-known poets. The same six or seven names seemed to be everywhere, taking up all the literary oxygen and leaving none for me. Suffocation being a strict taboo in my religion, I instead wrote ‘All Dressed in Green’ and have been breathing freely ever since.”
Neil McCarthy: “Like many Irish, I’m riddled with nostalgia. I’ve learned to live with it, love it, and lyricize it. Like many Irish, I live abroad now, and having resided in LA and now Vienna, poetry helps me recreate snapshots and reels of an absolutely beautiful upbringing in West Cork.”
Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco: “I realize there are a thousand more important things happening in the world at large right now, but I wanted to write about the line of dialogue on Succession where Logan tells his children that he loves them, but they aren’t serious people. Succession was in the news a lot this week for various reasons (I’m not getting into spoilers here or in the poem), and something about that line hit me really hard because I feel like I can relate. Thank you for the chance to send these and for reading them all every week!”
Joanne McCarthy: “I write bi-lingually, in Irish and English. My English is a Hiberno-English that I inherited from my family in West Cork. I came to poetry through the Irish language first and I continue to read and write in Irish. My engagement in Irish language poetry continues to echo through my work in English.” (web)