“Poetry an Intra-space”
Alone, I walk through the low-lit galleries that house an exhibition of small ceramic vessels from Korea. The greens and blues are subdued and cool, pulsating. The whites are warm. Every pot and vase could be held in one hand. The clay pushes out like the body of a small animal.
I notice the space between these vessels as much as the vessels themselves. My eyes lead the way, at first, but then comes touch—
the hands that made each vessel, hands caring for small works. Small, like a pocket-sized book, an item possibly for everyday use, or for burials, perhaps decoration. The hands that arranged each pot just so and fixed the lighting, so sharp that the weave in the linen surfaces between vessels is thrown into relief—
gaps allowing for electricity between. Borders of the vitrines, framing objects, space, intensifying my sense of imagined touch.
I am in from out of town, at a professional conference—a frenzy of an event, showcasing everything from high-paid art labor to absolute labors of love. To feel the space between yet within the space is to remember the huge ballroom of the conference book fair, rows of tables touching each other, piles of books in hot, indecipherable conversation, too close, no windows.
I had to walk away, come and see these vessels in order to arrive here:
Poetry, the intra-space in the face of the heroism of the thing, the work, the effort, the legible, the confines of a well-argued idea, the too-big idea of a progressing career.
“Boomerang, or Coda: Teaching in the AI-Now”
The presence of generative AI is computing-as-boomerang and its trajectory has taken me back, as a teacher, to practices of reading out loud, practices that privilege speaking, handwriting, collaboration, and what I call the classroom as “a living essay.”
The boomerang has three points on its trajectory: the throw, an apex, and the return, and upon its return, it comes back faster and stronger.
We launched what we thought was a tool. We launched a weapon.
We begin with the perhaps-human desire to say something, and then we take off at writing as a way to be saying something and learning. This is the throw. Writing: a technology that is not natural or neutral. We agree, in college and university classrooms, that this essay-making enterprise is a worthwhile pursuit and in economies of higher education, we have long believed that it is a primary currency earning the grade, employment, promotion, and the capacity to even teach a subject matter. And so we begin.
In a handful of decades, word processing and computing comes along. In the early 90s I remember signing my name on a clipboard outside the computer lab at my university so that I could get a 45 minute slot to type up my paper, save to a floppy disc, and print. Before turning the paper in, I loved the physicality of tearing off the dot-matrix printer perforations along the sides. The ink was often faint; the font was very “computery”; the alignment was always a bit off; the page breaks never hit the perforations perfectly. My essay still looked like a made thing.
Then comes the internet, home computing, laptops, and the idea that with so many citations and texts at our fingertips we will get even better at this form of knowledge-production. Spell check and grammar check. These are AI and they have long been with us. Our alignment works well, the polish of typesetting is there. We could say this is the apex and it is marked by computing’s ubiquity.
Now comes generative AI. Now we are well beyond the apex, beyond the promises that computing held. We are now witnessing the flight, downward. Computing, a tool-turned-weapon, destined to hit us on the head if we don’t step aside.
My sidestep looks like this:
moving back and laterally to writing’s first aim: to say something, to make meaning. Writing as an epistemological tool, as Annie Dillard articulates in The Writing Life.
I regard my literature courses, which are part of the general education requirements at the university where I teach, as a laboratory for reading, writing, and thinking. A laboratory that does not include computing.
We read out loud, ask questions out loud, answer out loud and sometimes in pairs or small groups or a whole class. We turn to our notebooks and take notes based on our questions and discussions. We pull quotes out of the textbook—three volumes of literature—and rewrite them in our notebooks. We write paragraphs in our notebooks, silently, in class. We read these paragraphs or sentences to each other. We go back to the notebook page to refine our thoughts, expand our thoughts, disagree with ourselves. We cover—through reading, speaking, writing, and research through the library’s portal only—lessons learned, thoughts on form, information about the author, history, location, culture. We even may do some writing that mimics the poem or story’s theme or form. We divide up these modes of inquiry, opinion, analysis, context and string our paragraphs together like beads on a string. In sequence, we read these paragraphs out loud and this makes a living essay, draft #1. We might record our performance of these living essays, take the sound recording and with software convert it to a text file: a computing tool that does not offer us new language except for where it mishears what we have said. We print this document out and with pens and pencils, we make marks: editing, adding, cutting, moving paragraphs, expanding, questioning, rewriting. We then go back into the text file and enter these revisions, read the new version out loud, consider it, and either revise some more or call it a day.
Computing is turned way down, as volume goes. Speaking is turned way up. Handwriting is primary. Our notebooks: the constant. An essay is rarely authored alone.
I have orchestrated a space in which we have stepped aside, protecting the classroom body from the intensified and high-speed flight of a boomerang that would render us mute.
It is all glitch. A glitch to jam up computing’s power. In that by stepping aside we insert a wedge into the forward flow of the supposed smooth and error-free acceptance of a tool serving the interests of
splitting and breaking off from the corporate university’s expectations
away from the labor of speed, which serves—
This speed, according to the shape of this world which promises betterment while simultaneously dehumanizing—for profit, for some
yet inevitable, too, is our glitch
which is to encounter/orchestrate the swerve felt instant by instant, away from computing’s total capture
to choreograph moves into the space nearby, the between, the slow, that which drops out into the moment-by-moment of thought and sound, messy, exciting, ungroomed and becoming utterances
and this is poetry.
Jill Magi works in text, image, and textile and is the author of six books that mix poetry, prose, and image. Forthcoming in spring 2026 is My Penelope from Essay Press which collects over 20 years of mostly prose meditations on poetics and teaching. Forthcoming in 2027 from Nightboat Books is a sister text to My Penelope entitled Hinge: Remember Me to Textiles. Hinge gathers over ten years of research on textiles, handwork, and textility—a disposition toward writing, art, matter, and being that privileges the liveliness of line, enmeshment, and movement over standardized concepts of arrival, belonging, and settling.