The Real Deal - Julian Randall - Among Today's Most Powerful Poets - Recites "Grief"
****************************************Photos From Our March 26th Spring Festival Event at Cafe Frida GalleryIris Jamahl Dunkle
Carl Macki
Ed Coletti
Pamela Singer
Hilary Moore
Pat Nolan
Gail King
Rob DeLillo
Avotcja
Steve Shain
and now Save the Date for the Upcoming Sizzling Summer Reading Please put the Next Cafe Frida/Ed Coletti Poetry Festival Event on your Calendar. It will occur on Sunday June 25, 2023 from 1-3PM featuring
The Real Deal - Julian Randall - Among Today's Most Powerful Poets - Recites "Grief"
Iris Jamahl Dunkle
- Terry Ehret
- David Beckman
- Sandra Anfang
- David Madgalene
- Phyllis Meshalum
- Jodi Hottel
- Steve Shane soloing on his magic bass
- Richard Long (editor of 2 River Review)
- Raphael Block (sharing from his new book)
My Brief Counterphobic Flirtation With Chat GPT
My Brief Counterphobic Flirtation With Chat GPT
Dear Friends,
I am writing this letter in collaboration with
Chat Gpt. It
is an experiment. I want the letter to be written in the style of
Kazuo
Ishiguro who won the Academy Award as screenwriter of "Living" for
which the great Bill Nighy was nominated as Best Actor.
Joyce and I
watched it recently. It now has become my favorite of the Oscar nominees
from this
past year. I'd say Banshees of Innesherin is a close second.
Dear Friends,
I've asked chat gpt not to
describe Ishiguro's
style but to write this letter IN that style. However, Chat GPT "chose" to spend at least half of its effort on third person narrative description of Ishiguro and his methods. Having reread the text, I've noticed that CG (ChatGpt) does in fact quickly get into the first person and assumes something like the style of Ishiguro. Therefore, for my purposes here, I will drop the more process oriented travels through my half-day of "discussion" with CG and my attempts to convince it to do things in my way. I especially am pleased with the final seven "stanzas" of this missive. The italics are my own.
But, wait! I now realize that those final lines of the "letteer"are in large measure identical to the opening lines. Thus, I once again am mindful of Eliot's prophetic Four Quartets and especially in Little Gidding,
“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time."
(CG) And yet, we persist in our efforts to capture the fleeting moments
of our
lives, to pin them down onto the page, as if by doing so we might
somehow make
sense of them. It is a curious impulse, one that I have long
struggled to understand. Ed
(ChatGpt) As I sit down to respond to your request, I am struck by the weight of memory that seems to accompany every keystroke. Forgive me, if my words are tinged with a certain wistfulness, for I find that nostalgia has a way of coloring even the most mundane of tasks.
You asked me to write, and so I shall endeavor to do so, though I cannot help but wonder whether the act of writing itself is not an exercise in futility. After all, what is a mere string of words in the face of the vastness of human experience? What can a story, a poem, or a novel hope to achieve in a world so full of noise and confusion?
************************************************************
(Ed) Although the preceding passage is stylistic, I've only been marginally successful with the style vs substance issue. With AI, at least in the deleted sections of this experiment, substance has triumphed, and this makes sense since substance is quantitative , with style being almost entirely qualitative. So now, I'm going to try to force chatgpt to err toward writing the rest of this in the style of Ishiguro. I'm also planning to ask it to portray a discussion between Nighy's character Rodney Williams and his new young friend Miss Margaret Harris in the movie "Living". We'll see what he can glean from other than my input. (Now, this also could lead me into a future discussion of plagiarism since ChatGpt does not appear to be very "interested" in ascriptions at this point in its development.)
Here is a very brief example of CG's now stricken third person narrative, (CG) "In many of Ishiguro's novels, the relationships between characters are often characterized by a sense of distance or disconnection. This can be seen in works such as "Never Let Me Go" and "The Remains of the Day," where the central characters struggle with their own emotional barriers and struggle to connect with others." I persisted in telling AI to write the
following in the style
of Ishiguro. It responded immediately and before I had a chance to
insert the
passage. The response was the dramatically stylistic one which
follows:
And yet, we persist in our efforts to
capture the
fleeting moments of our lives, to pin them down onto the page,
as if by doing
so we might somehow make sense of them.
As I sit down to respond to your request, I am struck by the weight of memory that seems to accompany every keystroke.
Forgive me, if my
words are tinged with a certain wistfulness, for I find that
nostalgia has a
way of coloring even the most mundane of tasks.
You asked me to write, and so I shall endeavor to do so, though I cannot help but wonder whether the act of writing itself is not an exercise in futility.
After all, what is a mere string of words in the face of the vastness of human experience?
What can a story, a poem, or a novel hope to achieve in a world so full of noise and confusion?
It is a curious impulse,
one that I
have long struggled to understand. Perhaps it is because we are mortal, and we
know that our
time on this earth is limited. Perhaps it is because we are
afraid, and we hope
that by telling stories we might be able to keep the darkness at
bay. Or
perhaps it is simply because we are human, and it is in our
nature to create,
to imagine, to dream.
Whatever the reason, I find myself drawn to the act of writing, even as I question its worth. For there is something cathartic in the process of putting pen to paper, of allowing the words to flow from my mind onto the page.
And so I write, not because I believe that
my words will
change the world, but because they are a part of who I am. They
are the echoes
of a life lived, the whispers of a soul trying to make sense of
the world
around it.
I write, and I hope that in doing so, I might be able to capture something of the human experience, something that might resonate with others and make them feel a little less alone in this vast and bewildering world.
(Ed)
I tire and will now re-tire. Here I am writing only as the mere Ed Coletti. The process has been a long but enjoyable (perhaps an addicting) one. I will certainly be back at it! For now, enough!
Cheers from,
The Ed Coletti I still
believe myself
to be
MPR – online and print poetry journal for the new now
Two Poems by Ed Coletti
Time Travel On a Bicycle
Nothing much about the forty-six years since
I lived in that little Marin town of Fairfax
I visited today with a friend and
could not even begin to fathom
the sheer bulk of time so encompassed
while the space of the town remained as
it had been then where only time had changed
along with me at 72 no longer 26
riding my 10-speed high frame Raleigh
across Broadway at Bolinas
on to other pretty tiny towns
Larkspur Mill Valley Sausalito
over the Golden Gate
into vaporous San Francisco on Lombard
to Gough Street to fly down Bush
into the city’s heart its Tenderloin
Union Square and back once again
through its Presidio and Fort Point
that glorious autumn rust of a bridge
back into the early Seventies
warmth
. that was the County of Marin.
El Pequeño Valle
Ellie taking a crack at getting in touch
Big birds squawking at sunup
Nothing as elusive to Ellie as Ellie.
Patas monkey screech, river echoing,
She scratches the diminutive valley
Between right hip and rib.
Crocodiles in slow race glide.
Ellie’s single fingers part and press
While, with spoonbills daintily hovering,
Ellie trying, gives it all she’s got.
And softly rocking herself in place
Ellie’s got quite a bit going for herself,
Floating down the Rio Negro accompanied
By howler monkey’s ominous baying
Ellie rubbing awake that seldom recalled
Little valley of sensitivity above her hip
Beneath her bottom rib on the right side
Just then as a tropical sun surmounts
The Nicaraguan horizon’s growing blaze
Igniting, oh this brilliant morning conflagration
Of major minor undiminished tropical birds,
She shouts with the fledgling sun
Then listens to the Rio Negro’s whisper.
Todo es bien aqui donde el rio le susurra.
About the Poet
Ed Coletti is a poet, painter, fiction writer and middling chess player. Previously,he served for three years as an Army Officer, then as a Counselor, college instructor, and later as a Small Business Consultant. Recent poems have appeared in ZYZZYVA, North American Review, Volt, Spillway, and Blueline. Most recent poetry collections include The Problem With Breathing (Edwin Smith Publishing –Little Rock- 2015) and Apollo Blue’s Harp And The Gods Of Song published by McCaa Books February 2019. Ed also curates the popular ten-year-old blog “No Money In Poetry” http://
