"What are your rhetorical goals in a poem, given that you write in multiple analog and digital formats? Sasha Stiles: I think I’ve always been a metapoet — making poems about poetry. I tend to think of poetry as a technology, as an ancient, durable data storage solution. Humans invented poetic devices to save and transmit information: behaviors, stories, and memories that we had no other way of storing before written language. For many people, poetry and technology don’t go together. They regard poetry as the essence of what it means to be human, and technology as soulless, unemotional, nonhuman. But technology is what has made us human over time. When I started writing poems about things like artificial wombs and digital immortality, some readers would say: “This is science fiction, it’s not poetic.” But poets have been writing about these topics forever: being pregnant, giving birth, dying, being sick, finding and losing faith, grieving, longing, loving, grappling with identity. When I started using GPT-2 to write generative poetry in 2018, I got a lot of pushback about how it was lazy, or cheating, or antithetical to being a writer. But the forces of automation and digital technologies already exert such a profound influence on our human condition, so why wouldn’t I use them in my work? Transhuman poetry feels only natural to my transhuman existence."