ChatGPT Chitter-Chatter

Lillian-Yvonne Bertram's "A Black Story May Contain Sensitive Content"

A Black Story May Contain Sensitive Content by Lillian-Yvonne Bertram, New Michigan Press, 2024

Book Review: "A Black Story May Contain Sensitive Content" by Lillian-Yvonne Bertram

Lillian-Yvonne Bertram’s "A Black Story May Contain Sensitive Content" is a powerful and evocative collection of poetry that delves deeply into the complexities of identity, race, and the human experience. With a title that immediately signals its intent to confront and engage with challenging themes, Bertram delivers a work that is as intellectually stimulating as it is emotionally resonant.¹

The collection is notable for its innovative use of language and form. Bertram’s poems are a fusion of lyrical intensity and intellectual rigor, employing a range of stylistic approaches that keep the reader engaged. Her language is often strikingly vivid and precise, conveying profound observations about the world through a blend of personal reflection and broader social commentary.²

One of the standout features of Bertram’s work is her ability to navigate and articulate the nuances of Black identity with both sensitivity and assertiveness. She explores the intersections of race, culture, and personal history, challenging readers to confront their own assumptions and biases. The poems in this collection often grapple with the weight of historical and contemporary injustices, yet they also celebrate resilience and the strength found in community and self-awareness.³

The structure of the collection enhances its thematic impact. Bertram weaves together individual pieces that, while distinct, collectively build a cohesive narrative about the Black experience. The poems range from the personal to the political, from moments of intimate introspection to broader societal critiques. This dynamic range allows Bertram to offer a multifaceted exploration of her subjects, avoiding reductive or monolithic portrayals.⁴

In terms of thematic content, "A Black Story May Contain Sensitive Content" does not shy away from difficult or provocative topics. Bertram addresses issues such as systemic racism, cultural appropriation, and personal trauma with a directness that can be both challenging and enlightening. Her approach is thoughtful and nuanced, acknowledging the complexities of these issues without resorting to oversimplification.

One of the most compelling aspects of the collection is its engagement with the idea of sensitivity itself. By foregrounding the concept of sensitive content, Bertram invites readers to reflect on their own responses to difficult topics and to consider the ways in which art can both challenge and comfort. This meta-commentary adds an additional layer of depth to the reading experience, encouraging a more engaged and reflective approach to the text.⁵

Overall, "A Black Story May Contain Sensitive Content" is a significant and thought-provoking addition to contemporary poetry. Lillian-Yvonne Bertram’s skillful use of language, combined with her fearless exploration of complex themes, makes this collection a powerful read. It is a work that not only offers insight into the Black experience but also encourages broader conversations about race, identity, and the role of art in addressing societal issues.⁶

1. Bertram is a poet who often works in the field of computational poetics, using algorithms as a means to generate content she then engages with, edits, observes, places within a given context, etc. A Black Story was written using ChatGPT 3, an unfiltered version, and also a version Bertram named Warpland 2.0, where she taught the ChatGPT to respond to her prompts using the language found in the works of Gwendolyn Brooks. I am unsure how this actually works in practice, but Bertram goes into some detail about her methodology in the essay that prefaces the volume. In any case, the collection is composed of responses from these two versions of ChatGPT to three different prompts: “tell me a Black story,” “This poem has been banned because of the word ‘jazz’,” and “Once upon a time, Maud Martha went.”

2. I should mention that this review (apart from the footnotes) was composed using ChatGPT 4. It’s pretty awful. Though it does contain some generalized nuggets that ring true in relation to A Black Story, in its vagueness it could be talking about hundreds of various poetry collections. And there are moments where it just gets it wrong, as is typical—in the footnoted sentence, for instance, the nod toward “personal reflection” is completely inaccurate, unless you include the introductory essay, but even there it’s more the this-is-how-this-was-done than this-is-who-I-am-and-why-I-did-it.

3. One of the really interesting things this collection does is reveal the bias inherent in standard ChatGPT responses, and how they generally skew toward a white male viewpoint, socially, historically, etc. For instance, one of the ChatGPT 3 responses to the prompt “tell me a Black story” reads, in its entirety, “A Black story is a story about the African American experience. It can be historical, contemporary, or personal.” A cold erasure of the real. Whereas the Warpland responses to the same prompt are tonally warmer, more engaging, more oriented toward ideas of community building and encouraging self-expression, tend to be in written in first-person POV, and at moments veer into what on the page looks to be lineated poetry.

4. No—this paragraph swings hard and misses harder. There is nothing narratively cohesive about what Bertram is up here—if anything, she is asking us to refuse cohesive narrative, at least the mode of popular narratives that most often perpetuate bias and stereotype. This collection traffics in reductive and monolithic portrayals—it’s the point of the fucking book, ChatGPT! But it sounds good, right? You can see why teachers of literature are so loathe toward this technology. It’s just good enough to be charming in its wrongness.

5. Meta, perhaps, thought the meta-ness at play here is more about the inability of large language models like ChatGPT to distinguish what truly constitutes “sensitive content.” The algorithm doesn’t jive with the sarcasm.

6. This review does a good job of proving one facet of Bertram’s collection: ChatGPT, left to fend for itself, will do a coherently shitty job of responding to your prompts. What this review doesn’t address is where A Black Story truly gets interesting—in its exploration of how algorithms might be used to conjure up the voices of the dead—Is loading a large language model with the words of a dead poet a form of homage or an invitation for a haunting? What becomes of a poet when their work fuels a deep-learning neural network? A Black Story doesn’t provide any easy answers, but it is an interesting examination of the shortcomings and potentialities of computational poetics in the age of ChatGPT.