‘Rune-casting with Predictive Text’ by Kerrin Smith

“Rune-casting” and “predictative text” seem like an unlikely pairing, but they work perfectly together as inverse entities—the ancient and the modern, folklore and API, Tolkien and Flarf. If runes are sometimes tied to the subconscious—that which is unspoken and unfelt but present with us always—then predictive text is a crude approximation of being known before we speak.

So here we have ‘Rune-Casting With Predictive Text,’ a prose poem by Kerrin Smith, with its shape-shifting focus. It’s bookended with a repeated somber lyricism

If I could sing there are songs I’d sing all the time

and in-between we get the surreal

the owl went through a small child

the unexpected juxtaposition

at least five recently published peer-reviewed journals// give us the opportunity for unbridled passion// of the Christ//

and the bizarre

he most bummer road trip playlist ever since// my flight to feel nervous// about driving the// ocean is going to be a big fiction//

As you can see, Smith breaks up her text with “//” which I take to mean the start of a new line of predictive text, but the breaks don’t fall in concert with natural sentence structures—it appears that she starts a new phrase of predictive text before the previous one is done so as to tie them together. It’s weirdly, beautifully compelling—something to examine and divine, as if it’s holding something back from the reader, some hidden command.

Occulum