The other day this line popped into my head:

When despair for the world grows in me

It’s the opening line of the Wendell Berry poem “The Peace of Wild Things”. I’m sure there were many reasons it surfaced from my subconscious (*gestures at everything*), but regardless I was grateful it did because brought to mind the rest of the poem, which was one of the first I memorized.

Then it dawned on me: Poetry is artificial intelligence.

What is poetry if not a large language model comprised of vast amounts of text created by humans about every conceivable topic? And what is a poem if not a response to a specific prompt that can be summoned for whatever question or trouble you have?

I’m being cheeky, but the power of the arts and humanities is no joke. They’re reliable companions that can enrich our lives and help us understand and contextualize and prophesy if we just ask them to.