Lately, my younger two children have begun co-opting my phone, so as to text their older sibling, who is away at college. Their communications are mostly what you might expect, frantic gestures of affection and well-wishing that remind me of the way people used to wave handkerchiefs in the air, after ships departing from docks. Their text chains are filled with memes and GIFs, pictures of newborn puppies sleeping in piles, clips of young polar bears embracing each other and then falling over and tumbling down slopes. I miss you, they all say, or something to that effect. Come home.
A few weeks ago I came across one exception—a series of curious messages sent by my ten-year-old. I will always and forever love and miss your beautiful smile, one message read. I will never be forgotten and you are the only one who can see my heart. I will always and forever cherish and always love you and love your life. I was disappointed, much in the same way other parents speak of being disappointed when they discover vapes in their children’s pockets. But to my mind, this was even worse—this was bad writing.
Eventually my daughter explained to me that she had composed these messages using the predictive text feature on my phone. She typed in a word and the phone suggested the next word, based on an algorithm that aggregated all the language we sent to one another, and then crunched its numbers to determine the most likely pairings. She wrote I and the phone suggested will. She accepted will and the phone suggested always, and so on. Thank God, I thought. I will always and forever be grateful you didn’t write this.
I suppose what I was objecting to was the defining feature of the algorithm, which functioned by offering up the most commonly-used
pairings of words. There is nothing exciting, and even something a bit dispiriting, about hearing the same words packaged together over and over, especially when some of our highest feelings are reduced to the same handful of threadbare phrases. I know that predictive text is a fairly rudimentary form of AI, and there are much more sophisticated versions in play, but still, I can’t help but think, when I hear all the chatter about writers being replaced by machines—surely not. I am buoyed by my work here at New Letters, where each day I come across writing with such spark and originality, I am able to see familiar things in new ways, and at last put words to emotions and phenomena I’ve long felt and observed but have never been able to name. Never say never, the saying goes, but as for computers rising to the level of artists, at least in this sense, my feeling is: I’d like to see them try. In these pages you will come across pairings of words you’ve never seen before and will likely never see again. You will see words played with, arranged so that their meanings are doubled, troubled, up-ended. Take this passage from Julie Marie Wade’s “I Love You: A Symphony in Ten Instruments,” part of Out Here, her revelation of a chapbook: “Meet me in the/treble cleff of your dreams. When I was small & learning, I called/it the trouble cliff, sensing even then that music is love & love is falling.” Or take Denise Low’s description of Charlie Parker’s saxophone:
what a beauty
for the pawn shop not long before death a whirlwind of brass after the storm of his life the alto highs the lightning riffs.
Can’t you just see it, love as a troubled cliff, the horn as a whirlwind, its notes like lightning riffs? And isn’t it exhilarating, to see in this way?
We hope you enjoy discovering the treasures we’ve gathered here, the new ways of saying and seeing. Let us know what you think. We look forward to hearing from you at newletters@umkc.edu. Until next time, we wish you the very best.
—C. Hodgen