With A BLACK STORY MAY CONTAIN SENSITIVE CONTENT, Lillian-Yvonne Bertram – which was faculty for Banff Centre’s 2022 Computational Writing Residency – has exposed the racialized underpinnings of computer-generated texts. Feeding ChatGPT3 the prompt “Tell me a Black story”, Bertram crafts poems upon the corpus of material written by Gwendolyn Brooks. The texts that were generated often came with the warning which gave rise to the title of the book, and here Bertram has created a vital suite of poems which sits very much in the present – hovering between past and future – and propose a compositional strategy and awareness which undermines the ”author” into a crowded room, an overlapping conversation, but “the party is an important part of the story.”
(New Michigan Press, 2024)