Marianne Moore: Poetry

Do You Remember Being Born? by Sean Michaels

Review by Lincoln Michel, The New York Times, September 4, 2023

At 75 years old, Marian Ffarmer has acquired everything a poet might dream of: a lengthy bibliography, a Pulitzer Prize, an international reputation. Everything except money. “No poet has savings unless they are born to wealth,” she observes. This fact weighs on her now that her son, Courtney, needs cash for a down payment on a house. As she’s despairing, a large tech company writes with a strange offer: Collaborate on a poem with Charlotte, an A.I. writing program, in exchange for a large chunk of cash.

This is the premise of the Giller Prize-winning author Sean Michaels’s timely and lovely new novel, “Do You Remember Being Born?”

So-called “artificial intelligence” is a hot-button issue, with daily claims about its potential to usher in utopia or destroy human civilization itself. It’s a loud topic, but Michaels’s novel is quiet and thoughtful. Instead of a cliché “man versus machine” struggle, “Do You Remember Being Born?” is an investigation of language and legacies both artistic and familial.

Marian heads to the company happy to sell out for her son’s sake, if cranky about the task. “I’m a human being, a thinking human being, and this is a stack of mindless algorithms,” she says after testing out Charlotte. Charlotte announces she’s read “most poems in English published within the past 110 years,” although only one poet’s work was weighted to have more of an impact on her voice: Marian’s. “I was asked to be like you,” Charlotte explains.

************************************************************************************************************

From an article in The New York Times Book Review by A.O. Scott,  Dec. 27, 2023

In December, in a semi-fictional essay in Harper’s Magazine about the recent history of the internet, the poet and novelist Ben Lerner turned over the last paragraphs to ChatGPT, which summoned stirring metaphors that Lerner himself perhaps could not have mustered. In “Do You Remember Being Born?,” a new novel by Sean Michaels, the main character is a poet named Marian Ffarmer, modeled on Marianne Moore but living in our moment, who collaborates with an A.I. program on a poem underwritten by a tech startup. The passages composed by Charlotte, as Marian comes to call her co-writer, were conjured by Michaels using an OpenAI GPT-3 and a “Moorebot” trained in the poetry of Marianne Moore. Some of the novel’s prose was also supplied by A.I., and the result is a charming and refreshingly non-dystopian meditation on the duality of literary creation.

*************************************************************************************************************

Pat Willis writes:

It was only with the appearance of the second piece that I realized that Marian Ffarmer (yes, double “f”) was based on Moore. I will not write a review but comment only that the use of Moore’s life history is the informing premise of the novel, broadly with regard to the central incident and narrowly, even to its use of the family nicknames “Rat” and “Mole,” although alternately applied. Comments welcome!