Forget AI.

Poetry is the Most Disruptive Technology I Know.

Sep 30, 2024

Today, I was teaching poetry.

We started with Maya Angelou’s “Still I Rise”:

She makes a powerful argument for bringing her body and self into her poem, refusing to let viewers ignore or define her. Rule #1 to battling oppressing (for Angelou) is not giving a sh** what the other person thinks.

Angelou’s repetition of “Still I Rise” further emphasizes her resistance.

From there, we went on to Neil Hilborn’s “OCD”:

In Hilborn’s poem, repetition doesn’t represent resistance. It represents a prison to break from free. Getting out of the cycle of repetition means—if only for a moment—pushing against his Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.

From there, my students and I did my favorite poem from today’s batch. It’s called “Lost Voices,” and is written and performed by Darius Simpson and Scout Bostley:

Every time I discuss this poem, the opening gets my students. There’s something jarring about watching two performers swap positions on stage, actively de-voice each other, and then proclaim “The problem with speaking up for each other is that everyone is left without a voice.”

It disrupts how we think about advocating for others. It disrupts how we think about using our position to give others a voice. It disrupts how many of us attempt to empathize by relating another’s experience to our own—a kind of false empathy that this poem discerns and decries.

The poem knocked us all on our butts.

Its power is that it disrupts our behavior, making us aware of how problematic that behavior may have been.

It hit my students with a power that AI never does.

My students and I landed on an argument, which I’m not entirely sure I agree with yet: Poetry is a disruptive technology.

I’m not sure if I agree with it yet. As I write this, I feel about 60% good about it, and 40% not-so-good.

But I’m still taking the plunge and sharing it. If it fails as an argument, hopefully I can take solace in the fact that my students and I created it together.

Here’s how we worked out the argument.

Wait…did you say technology?

Yes, I did.

I think we get too caught up with the glitz and glamor of modern-day technology.

We tend to think of machines and robots. But in truth, technology includes any tool. That’s why writing—a tool for thinking—has often been identified as a tool. Walter Ong even made that idea the subject of a famous lecture, “Writing Is a Technology That Restructures Thought.”

In the writing classroom, this means emphasizing the importance of “writing to learn” as opposed to “learning to write.” The very process of writing forces us to land on new ideas.

My students and I would like to extend that idea to poetry.

Ok…fine. But Disruptive?

Well, we already have the example of “Lost Voices.” That poem disrupted my students expectations, making them more self-aware of their actions and (if only for a moment) producing a behavior change.

That poem is not alone.

In fact, there are whole bodies dedicated to the disruptive nature of poetry and even Literature more generally. The Russian formalist critic Viktor Shklovsky, believed that poetry “defamiliarizes” the world around us.

It forces us to recognize just how strange humans are.

Consider, for a second, the opening of this poem. It’s from “A Martian Sends a Postcard Home” (1979) by Craig Raine:

Caxtons are mechanical birds with many wings
and some are treasured for their markings--

they cause the eyes to melt
or the body to shriek without pain.

I have never seen one fly, but
sometimes they perch on the hand.

It’s about an alien describing a typewriter (a Caxton). That’s it.

I know, it’s an impenetrable fog.

But that’s part of the poem’s point. You can’t read it quickly.

Poets often try to knock us on our butts, disrupting our usual patterns.

That’s why—to my surprise—by students are engaged by poetry year after year.

And these are the same students who see ChatGPT, Google NotebookLM, and Humanoid robots in action and think “Meh.”