Cool Webs
 

I think The Cool Web is a good starting-point for the poems I'm looking for, Ed. You'll have to write it. Is the Web Cool? Is the way we use the Web just a natural extension of the way we control and organise ourselves, using words to keep the dark at bay?

I wasn't really interested in "new forms of poetry", but in the poetry that continually tries to describe and witness the human condition. I suppose I'm looking for The Waste Land written in an age when many of us exist more vividly in cyberspace in our "e-personalities" than we do when we walk across London Bridge.

Perhaps I'm looking for a new take on Heaney's Digging," between my finger and my thumb/The squat pen rests." Will children use pens for much longer?

I agree that the Internet is still very "new", but I sense that it will move towards being a "front and centre" rather than a "backdrop" phenomenon. I don't think it's " just another bit of technology". It colonises our mental, social and cultural space like nothing else. It changes us in ways we don't understand. I'm looking for poets and poems that help me understand those changes. I think I've heard it described as "our migration into cyberspace." I can see that.

As Susan says, most of the poetry about the Internet that's out there is "Light Verse", and, perhaps, that's where the response is starting.

Apologies to Bill and all. I didn't read the thread thoroughly, just skimmed off a first impression. (I blame the Internet for my behaviour.)

Bill, I'm interested in on-line workshopping compared to real-time workshopping. I'm involved in both. I risk more in my crits on-line, but I carry a voice saying "tone it down, be more careful", but in face to face workshops I feel timid, with an opposing voice that says " for f*** sake say what you really think".

I'm in search of the experience, not the technology. I'm in search of the canonical rather than the Flarf.

When all else fails, I suppose I'll just have to sit at my screen (a shiny new one) and try to write something: light or clunky, canonical or not.

Bill, my favourite Error Haiku:

The Web site you seek
cannot be located but
endless others exist

--Joy Rothke (though I note this haiku seems to exist in other versions too!)

To my shame I haven't read Riddley Walker, but I have a copy and will start tomorrow!( Or I might just Google it.)

The Haiku file was passed around like the grail in the 90's. I think I first found it on a telnet:// site. There's a line from it I still use: "Reflect. Repent. Reboot!"

Ah, here it is: https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/error-haiku.html

As good as that was, it's got nothing on the chicken file: http://www.subgenius.com/bigfist/ans...n-Road_co.html

The 1995 date seems about right. My personal favorite is Faulkner's version...

Thanks,

Bill

Ps. Strike that last. My favorite now is Omar Khayyam's:

"I sent a hen through the astral plane
To learn our future, and man's luck,
And by and by the bird returned
But all she'd say was "Cluck, cluck, cluck!"

I wasn't wild about Bill's poem, but only because I wasn't savvy enough to make heads or tails of it. From the title on down, it referred to things only recognizable to initiates of Reddit--one of many venues which my life is quite rich without--so all the in-jokes sailed over my head and I could only evaluate the poem at face value.

That's the trouble with technology--you miss one or two new developments and suddenly you're up a creek, and don't even understand why you can't get something to work. And those developments come quickly, greatly reducing the shelf life of any poem that relies too heavily on them.

I deliberated between having someone refer to "my daughter's MySpace page" and "my daughter's Facebook page" in a poem written in 2007...finally bet on MySpace as being the platform more likely to last...and by the time the damn thing was published, it was already out of date. Since the poem had been a competition finalist, I wasn't allowed to change it from what the judge had seen two years earlier. Sigh. That experience has made me wary of painting a poem into a corner with technological references that may or may not age well.

[quote=Julie Steiner] "That's the trouble with technology--you miss one or two new developments and suddenly you're up a creek, and don't even understand why you can't get something to work. And those developments come quickly, greatly reducing the shelf life of any poem that relies too heavily on them. . . ."

That's a very good point. Some poems referencing modern technology have managed to avoid that trap, like Anne Stevenson's "Television" and A.E. Stallings' "Ultrasound." I think part of their success was due to not dwelling on the particulars so much, and not requiring anything more of the reader than a basic familiarity with the devices in question. The technology was a metaphor or a symbol.

Best,

Ed

An earlier thread on a similar topic can be found here.

Just saw the link on Facebook (thanks, Chris Childer). Here it is.

"They flash upon that inward eye..."
 

Thanks Gregory, that’s an interesting thread. I feel much the same way as Andrew Frisardi when I look at most poems which attempt to include technological change and social media. They seem, in Andrew’s words “rationalised and contrived”, or, as a poem he cites seems: ”taken from the most superficial ego-consciousness of the poet. Amusing in its own way, and that’s about it.”

Tim Love writes: “Trying to be timeless, to write for posterity, is understandable, but not at the expense of insulating oneself from the present and the things we all share.”

Andrew, referencing a quote by Edwin Muir, writes that “For me, that bit about essential human identity becoming “indistinct” in the constant flux of technological change is key.”

It’s about the way our essential selves are being moulded, hobbled, or enhanced by the storm of technological change that surrounds us. As Tim Love wrote, the various technologies “let us more easily be alone without being lonely”. Perhaps Wordsworth’s “Daffodils”, transposed to online interactions best captures the zeitgeist. Or, as Maryann Corbett wrote in Myspace Invader : “What strangeness will engulf our lives…”

I don’t think the electronic and digital realm we are now beginning to live in will become “outdated”, it will only grow more pervasive. Will it change the way a love poem is written? The last post on the previous “Roadkill on the Information Highway” writes of “giant nude girls” and “Never trust the web”(Jerome Betts). I can only dream of what the sleep of reason might produce.

Apologies to all Spherians I may have quoted out of context here!

Has somebody said that it is possibe to programme computers to write sonnets. I shall see if I can find any examples.

Here they are.

How can the purple yeti be so red,
Or chestnuts, like a widgeon, calmly groan?
No sheep is quite as crooked as a bed,
Though chickens ever try to hide a bone.
I grieve that greasy turnips slowly march:
Indeed, inflated is the icy pig:
For as the alligator strikes the larch,
So sighs the grazing goldfish for a wig.
Oh, has the pilchard argued with a top?
Say never that the parsnip is too weird!
I tell thee that a wolf-man will not hop
And no man ever praised the convex beard.
Effulgent is the day when bishops turn:
So let not then the doctor wake the urn!


Shall I compare thee to a noxious bed?
Thou art more like a graceful squalid egg:
For none will ever warmly call thee red
Until, my elk, they see us choke a leg.
My heart is crimson, likewise is it blue,
When e'er I see the hopeless maidens growl;
I stunned the reckless butler - for a gnu
Had crudely whistled as it found a fowl.
Alas! the days of android, blob and pine
Are gone, and now the stainless scarecrows fume;
Icelandic was the reindeer, now so fine
And vermin cannot heat the chuckling broom.
But thou, my falling gorgon, shalt not write
Until we firmly stand at Heaven's light.


Oh major-general, tell me why the crane
Should be delinquent when the chickens melt:
A rotting goldfish never oils a brain,
Although 'tis true that urchins mend a pelt.
My heart is verdant, likewise is it shy,
When e'er I see the crippled onions talk;
I maimed the foolish bedpan - for a fly
Had quickly waddled as it lost a stork.
I saw a bus-conductor bravely mope
With mice as half-baked as a rattling spleen:
I revelled with a claymore and a rope,
But had a dream of poodles and felt green.
Consumptive is the day when felons run:
So let not then the butcher jab the nun!


Jonathan R. Partington

And here is one I wrote. Can you tell the difference?

I have grown tired of all those well-worn phrases
We use when love has dwindled to affection.
Doors close, doors open, nothing more than phases.
Now intonation shows in the selection
Of poses to preserve: I see you laughing
And read the runes – I’m not illiterate.
I fended off your mum’s aggressive chaffing
Continually, and didn’t mind a bit;
As for your dad – he sketched our history freehand
If he had doubts he kept them to himself.
The one fruit of their tree had been well seasoned
Why soil what looked so perfect on the shelf?
The plain truth is, though I could take your parents
I couldn’t face a lifetime running errands.

John, programming a computer to write a sonnet all depends on how much you "feed into" it. I rather like some of the lines in your first example above, but I suspect that a great deal of feeding was done.