An essay by poet Geraldine Mitchell on the writer’s craft in an age of war, AI, and corrupted ethical standards. Born in Dublin, Geraldine has been living on the Mayo coast for twenty-five years and increasingly divides her time between her Mayo home and southern France, where her daughter, son, and two grandchildren live. Geraldine’s fifth collection, Naming Love, was published in April 2024. Geraldine won the Patrick Kavanagh Award in 2008 and is widely published and anthologised. A selection of her work has been translated into French, Galician and Bosnian. In 2024, she was one of three poets commissioned to collaborate on the Silent Objects/Spoken Lives project by the Mayo County Council Arts Service, the National Museum of Ireland and Poetry Ireland.

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A poem cannot stop a bullet. A novel can’t defuse a bomb. 

But we are not helpless. We can sing the truth and name the liars. 

– Salman Rushdie

Some people see writer’s block as a lame excuse for being short on inspiration; for others it’s a painful fact. I belong to the latter category. Every writer will have a writer’s block story to tell. What interests me more, however, is the unblocking, the obscure forms that prayed-for release can take. It so often appears to be unrelated to anything in the writer’s writing life. My poems had begun to dry up when Russia invaded Ukraine in March 2022. They more or less stopped after October 2023. Then in March this year came a chance discovery about a deceased aunt, followed swiftly by a stark, out-of-the blue wake-up call to do with the threat of unregulated AI, not just to writers, but to language itself. Here’s what happened.  

   Last autumn I was invited, alongside poets Martina Evans and Sean Borodale, to work on a collaborative project involving the Museum of Country Life, Mayo Arts Office and Poetry Ireland. This project, Silent Objects/Spoken Lives, was in itself a godsend. It kept my writing muscle in minimum shape as it commissioned all three of us to lend voice to some of the museum’s artefacts. It meant developing an intimate relationship with the country life collection and included a fascinating glimpse behind the scenes where thousands of objects are stored in a vast hangar. This backstage visit was both eerie and moving, evocative of Derek Mahon’s ‘Disused Shed in Co.Wexford’ on a massive scale and, unnervingly, much like looking into my own blocked imagination.  

   Taking part in the Silent Objects/Spoken Lives project has meant revisiting Ireland’s history of poverty and conflict and being struck over and over by the sheer beauty of objects – baskets, lobster pots, boats, chairs, agricultural implements and all nature of ephemera – all made in hardship and out of necessity. The pointers began to come into focus. Already I was receiving a clear message about human resilience, resistance even, through the act of making. The origins of the word ‘poetry’ are in the Greek poiein meaning to make; what’s more, the word ‘museum’ comes from the Greek term mouseion, which, I discovered, is a temple or shrine dedicated to the Muses. All these connections and shared attributes set me thinking too about the word ‘craft’, so crucial to makers, whether of poems or of handmade objects for everyday use. 

   In the course of the project, Liam Doherty, the museum keeper whose task was to liaise with us poets, sprung a surprise. He knew that my late aunt Lillias Mitchell (1915-2000) had been, from 1951 until her retirement in 1980, a teacher of spinning, weaving and dyeing at the National College of Art in Dublin. One day he unearthed for me, like something hatched from thin air, the copy of a short thesis about my aunt’s work “prepared for an M.A. Degree at New York by Sister Carmel Murtagh, Sisters of Mercy, Dublin.” 

   I knew of my aunt’s friendship with this nun, who had been a pupil of hers and became a keen weaver. Reading the short research paper I came on a quote from an interview Sr. Carmel had conducted with my aunt in 1981. The sentence leapt off the page. Referring to the early 1940s when she had a dull part-time job as heraldic artist in the Office of Arms, Dublin Castle – while continuing to paint and make sculptures of her own – my aunt tells Sr. Carmel: “It seemed ridiculous to spend one’s life painting when the world was at war and men were dying.” 

   It is hard to convey the depth of my surprise, and the comfort it brought me, to read these words. It was a side of my aunt and a part of her life I knew nothing about. There she was, feeling the futility of making art or painting family coats of arms at a time of mass killing, just as to write poems in the face of the barbarity of world events today was feeling increasingly futile to me. As a way of squaring her conscience with her creative compulsion, in 1942 she upped and got herself a job as an art teacher in a school in Wales. She had decided to act on her distress rather than sit at home feeling powerless and irrelevant. 

   She returned to Ireland when the war ended and continued to teach and share a new-found passion for textiles discovered while in Wales. This led to a pensionable job and economic independence as well as a quiet conscience. Against the odds, she had found her way out of a moral dilemma and continued to make art, as well as teach, all her life. I opened my neglected notebook and, watching the annual turf wars over nesting rights break out in my remote Mayo seaside garden – not just listening to, but all at once hearing the birds – I began again to write. Not much, not immediately a finished poem of course, but something had shifted.

   Days later I heard by chance, and at very short notice, of an event at the Edinburgh Futures Institute (EFI). Poet Kathleen Jamie would be reading a handful of specially commissioned poems while Aberdeen-based artist, filmmaker and researcher with the PAInting Music project, Kate Steenhauer, would respond on stage by making paintings, which in turn would be translated into music through AI. 

   That evening, I joined the event online. The short performance was mesmerising, baffling, unsettling. Most interesting was the discussion which followed, excellently moderated by poet and translator Patrick James Errington, whose mistrust of AI was echoed, if not outbid, by Jamie’s – and mine. Steenhauer’s command of the subject and her strong ethical stance on AI, her mission to make it explainable (which only 5% of AI presently is, as opposed to the 95% which is black box and, as such, unaccountable) was impressive. Her purpose in all she does, she told the audience, is “to stimulate conversation about AI and AI ethics.”

   I came away from that ninety-minute event excited, and stimulated. Above all I was strengthened in my belief in the mystery of human language, and in our urgent duty, as poets in particular, to preserve and defend words, their endless, alchemistic possibilities, their capacity to express emotion, to change the way we see and feel the world. Words, that is, used in the expression of unique and infinitely various human experience, not random words ‘harvested’ from existing anonymised works, algorithmically reassembled into semblances of meaning by or through AI. 

   I watched and listened as Kathleen Jamie expressed what to anyone in the business of writing creatively was the obvious, but in the context of AI seemed important to spell out: why the poetic process is irreplaceable by AI and the opposition between process – the poet sitting with pen and paper making a poem; and product – a computer producing a ‘poem’ from an indiscriminate feed of words and letters. She spoke of nurturing vowel sounds, the careful shaping of poems, the subtleties of language, all lost in the translation, via painting, to AI-generated music. Steenhauer stated bluntly, “AI doesn’t understand language”,  

   So my conclusion, my maybe-solution to my own particular strain of writer’s block? That there is another war to be waged and it’s longer-term than those at present flouting every international law, breaking hearts and filling us with impotent anger. That this other war is the war against the corruption of language, its erosion, a war that as writers we have no choice but to enlist for and to remain in for the long haul – however futile it so often feels. 

   Just as my aunt Lillias took decisive action, finding meaning in her own life while sharing her knowledge of making with others, as writers too we must do what we are good at, what we believe in, which is to defend the unique human gift of language, to be genuinely creative with words, to make out of them what was not there before. We must have the courage to be truth-sayers in an ever more rapidly disaggregating world where writers and poets are fast becoming last ditch defenders of the truth Salman Rushdie exhorts us to sing.