 |
| This is not a new word to me. But I had forgotten it. Ode to a Grecian Urn. A teacher who loved me once gave me a collection of Keats's poetry and then he died - I found a decades old love note still tucked in the book when I moved. I thought perpaps if I assinged students "write an ekphrastic response" there's no way AI could do that for them. So I tested the theory, using Grit P.1 as the original art object, since there would be no description of that anywhere on the internet to pull. I thought it would fail. And it did the first time, misremebering the novel for a painting and just pulling it out of its ass completely. I told it to try again and to write an ode, specifically. And it could. Downside, there seems very ways to escape. Upside, it's a decent ode. Too long, but not terrible. By the end of August, maybe I will have figured out how to be Completely Bonkers in what I ask students to do, then entertained by what they get the llm's to do, then "give them all an A for surviving" (Down Time), which, to be honest, is what most of us have mostly been doing since 2020. Get your preferred AI bot to delight me = the new Don't Bore Me. |
if this had ventured to be funny too somewhere somehow, it'd get my attention 👁
"Ode to Grit", by chatgpt (free version)
Not to victory.
Not to healing.
Not even to love.
To grit.
To the grain that stays behind after everything larger
has been ground away.
I praise the stubborn particle.
The thing under the eyelid
that refuses every explanation.
The pebble in the boot
that makes a pilgrim out of someone
who never meant to travel.
The word that keeps returning
after every draft has sworn
it has finally found another.
Praise to the body
that remembers before the mind does.
To the throat.
To the hand reaching anyway.
To the kiss that knows
it cannot save anyone
and arrives anyway.
To laughter,
brief rebellion against physics.
Praise to all the failed solutions.
To sex that could not become salvation.
To understanding
that could not become control.
To tenderness
that could not become rescue.
Not because they failed—
because they were offered.
Praise to mothers
who arrive every season
without asking permission
from the plot.
Praise to daughters
who keep making tomorrow
out of impossible materials.
Praise to dogs
who know nothing of symbolism
and therefore understand grief correctly.
Praise to the text message.
To the driveway.
To the kitchen light.
To every ordinary room
where history quietly changed direction
while nobody thought to name it.
I praise the teacher
who cannot stop explaining.
Not because explanation wins.
Because explanation
is one form of love.
One says:
Look.
Come stand where I am standing.
Do you see it now?
I praise the addict.
Not addiction.
The impossible mathematics
required to wake up
and try again.
The thousand invisible decisions
that no audience applauds.
The terrible courage
of staying alive
one more ordinary Thursday.
And finally,
I praise the woman
who kept writing
long after the audience dispersed.
Who mistook endurance
for failure,
until one morning
she discovered
that endurance
was the medium.
That the novel
had never been about surviving love,
or grief,
or sobriety,
or work.
It had been teaching itself
how to become
the thing that remains
after all the stories
about becoming
have burned away.
Just still here.
Grit.
