Diálogo de la lengua. El arte del prompting
Luis Correa-Díaz
Some books manage to give a name to what was already unfolding, even though no one quite knew how to articulate it. Diálogo de la lengua. El arte del prompting [Dialogue of Language. The Art of Prompting] by Luis Correa-Díaz is one such book. Published by Códice Ediciones de Poesía under the editorial direction of Miguel Ángel Zapata—in a limited run of 150 numbered copies that underscores its nature as an object both intimate and programmatic—this poetry collection positions itself with lucidity and boldness at the nerve center of our era: the conversation between poet and machine.
The title naturally evokes Juan de Valdés’s celebrated Diálogo de la lengua—that Renaissance treatise on the proper use of Spanish. Correa-Díaz takes up this foundational gesture and shifts it into unexpected territory: prompting as a form of poetic dialogue with ChatGPT and its counterparts. Yet it would be a mistake to reduce the book to a mere experiment with artificial intelligence. What unfolds here is a poetics of conversation in the broadest sense—with the machine, certainly, but also with memory; with a mother tongue eroded by exile; with friends and colleagues scattered across hemispheres; and with beloved dead and the living who do not yet know they are alive.
The prologue-manifesto, titled "New Poetic Science," establishes the theoretical coordinates with generous erudition and a lack of solemnity. Correa-Díaz—who, alongside Scott Weintraub, has mapped Latin American digital poetry within the Anglo-American academy—knows the terrain and its genealogies (Gancedo, Uribe, Doctorovich, Tisselli, Kac, and Gache, among others); yet he does not set out to lecture, but rather to embody the issue at hand. The central section, "Dialogue of the Language-lcd," confirms this in every poem: the long, conversational verse—a legacy of Chilean colloquialism and his extended residence in the English-speaking environment of Georgia—unabashedly absorbs emojis, mental hyperlinks, Wikipedia data, late-night confessions, and actual text responses from ChatGPT, which appear in quotation marks as if from a real interlocutor. The effect is not one of a technological gimmick but of an uncanny intimacy: the machine reflects an image of the poet back to himself that unsettles him, and within that disorientation, the poem finds its pulse.
The title naturally evokes Juan de Valdés’s celebrated Diálogo de la lengua—that Renaissance treatise on the proper use of Spanish. Correa-Díaz takes up this foundational gesture and shifts it into unexpected territory: prompting as a form of poetic dialogue with ChatGPT and its counterparts. Yet it would be a mistake to reduce the book to a mere experiment with artificial intelligence. What unfolds here is a poetics of conversation in the broadest sense—with the machine, certainly, but also with memory; with a mother tongue eroded by exile; with friends and colleagues scattered across hemispheres; and with beloved dead and the living who do not yet know they are alive.
The prologue-manifesto, titled "New Poetic Science," establishes the theoretical coordinates with generous erudition and a lack of solemnity. Correa-Díaz—who, alongside Scott Weintraub, has mapped Latin American digital poetry within the Anglo-American academy—knows the terrain and its genealogies (Gancedo, Uribe, Doctorovich, Tisselli, Kac, and Gache, among others); yet he does not set out to lecture, but rather to embody the issue at hand. The central section, "Dialogue of the Language-lcd," confirms this in every poem: the long, conversational verse—a legacy of Chilean colloquialism and his extended residence in the English-speaking environment of Georgia—unabashedly absorbs emojis, mental hyperlinks, Wikipedia data, late-night confessions, and actual text responses from ChatGPT, which appear in quotation marks as if from a real interlocutor. The effect is not one of a technological gimmick but of an uncanny intimacy: the machine reflects an image of the poet back to himself that unsettles him, and within that disorientation, the poem finds its pulse.
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Poems such as "Elegía al celular," [Elegy to the cellular phone] "Lonquimay," or "Kosmos 482" reveal a writer capable of shifting from tender humor to cosmic futuristic melancholy without forced transitions, sustained by a rhythm akin to thinking aloud. The second section—a advancement installment of Daruma & Co.—expands the scope to include the geopolitical, the ecological, and the spiritual, featuring remarkable pieces like "Materia," [Matter] where the Vera C. Rubin Observatory and Saint John of the Cross converge seamlessly, or "El libro de la selva," [The Book of the Jungle] which closes the volume with a luminous affirmation: AI is nothing less than "the living, torrential language of the jungle in the mouth of Mowgli."
Diálogo de la lengua is a necessary book—not because poetry needs artificial intelligence, but because artificial intelligence needs poetry in order to be interrogated with the depth it deserves. Correa-Díaz neither celebrates nor condemns; he converses. And in that conversation—impure and generous—he opens a path that others will surely follow. Luis Correa-Diaz is a corresponding Member to Academia Chilena de la Lengua, Real Academia de Ciencias, Letras y Artes de Córdoba (Spain), and North American Academy of the Spanish Languages, Distinguished Research Professor of Digital Humanities and Human Rights at the University of Georgia-USA. He is the author of La Bandera de Chile es extranjera en su propio país. La poesía civil/insurrecta de Elvira Hernández (2025), Latin American Digital Poetics (with Scott Weintraub, 2024), Un QR de amor en el jardín cósmico del agua (2026), Emocionario Porteño (2026), La región antártica famosa (2025), Trilogía pro tempore (2025), among others.
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