STILES API

For this episode, I'm revisiting “Ghost in the Machine,” the opening poem from my 2021 collection Technelegy (p. 14 in the paperback edition). The poem grew out of years of reading, wondering, and worrying about consciousness, identity, memory, digital immortality, and the evolving relationship between humans and technology -- questions that have become newly urgent in the age of generative AI. Through reflections on the poem and the ideas, influences, and obsessions that shaped it, I trace some of the conceptual roots of my ongoing collaboration with AI and explore why poetry remains my favorite way to grapple with life's big questions.

A few years ago, I set out to make a podcast about poetry and technology, my lifelong obsessions and the core of my work as a writer and artist working primarily with language. I was thinking about it less as a podcast and more as an extended studio visit: an auditory space in which to think with and through poems, to explore "poetic intelligence" as a vital literacy for our AI age, to talk to myself and others, to share excerpts from audiobooks, media-rich poems, live performances, and artist talks. At long last, here we go...