The other day, there was a prompt at the DS106 Daily Create in which we were asked to find a quote or a poem, and take a word from that text and build a poem around it.
I went to Annie Dillard for this passage:
“Go up into the gaps. If you can find them; they shift and vanish too. Stalk the gaps. Squeak into a gap in the soil, turn, and unlock-more than a maple- a universe. This is how you spend this afternoon, and tomorrow morning, and tomorrow afternoon. Spend the afternoon. You can’t take it with you.”
― Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
And I focused on the word “gap” to write this poem:
there, beneath
where you once
removed the river rock,
and tossed it to the trees,
an outline remains,
a pocket for rains
smooth sands
by gravity’s fingers;
and in your mind,
the rock’s still there;
it’s the gap that disappears
Afterwards, I really wanted to do something visual with the poem, and I tried all sorts of ways to show that there was a “gap” in the space where the rock once was, where there was a pocket of rain, but all of my experiments went nowhere.
In the end, I asked Claude AI to design a visual, and spent time giving it instructions — even at one point, asking it to create an interactive site where a reader could remove the stone, to leave a gap, and have the words of the poem become scrambled — but Claude failed in that. It did, however, generate the artwork I have here, which is not terribly bad, and better than the art I was designing.
Peace (and poems),
Kevin