"Roadkill on the Information Highway"
 

The title of the thread comes from the last line of a poem by Joseph Harrison, “Trajectory”, which is in his Waywiser 2007 book, Identity Theft. Here’s the opening:

Where were we, back before the whole world changed?
The person jabbering in the street alone
xxxxWas certainly deranged,
xxxxNow he’s just on the phone.

It’s a very witty and exhilarating poem which takes all its imagery and metaphors from the new technology. What struck me on reading the poem was just how rare this is. I can’t think of many contemporary poems that use language, ideas or images from the technology that now governs so much of our lives. This obviously is not the case in contemporary cinema or contemporary novels.

Now I’m not saying that poetry has any kind of duty to be breathlessly up-to-date and with-it (to use a rather antiquated term). In fact, I can think of numerous examples where an over-anxious desire to be so has acted against the poet’s intentions: take these lines from Tennyson’s “Locksley Hall”:

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxForward, forward let us range,
Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change.

Here Tennyson’s vagueness about the details of railway mechanics rather spoils the message he wants to convey. Another case in point might be that of the so-called Pylon Poets of the 1930s, rather too earnestly keen on dragging the latest technology into their works – like Soviet enthusiasts for the tractor.

However, having said all that, railways, telephones, and aeroplanes have all entered 20th-century poetry very successfully. If one thinks about it, one of Yeats’s most famous poems, “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death”, was about very recent technology. And this is Yeats, of the Golden Dawn! It seems to me that the technology of our own age is not lacking in poetic possibilities, so I just wondered if anyone can come up with interesting examples.

Here are a few more lines from Joseph Harrison’s poem:

I can’t not go along. Lord knows I’ve tried
To keep myself from getting up to speed
xxxxOn this text-messaged ride.
xxxxIn word, if not, indeed,
In correspondence, then at least in verse
I’ve felt the antiquated urge to try. Way
xxxxBack before we let
Happen the things that hadn’t happened yet,
Who thought we’d choose vehicular suicide?
xxxxAnd now, caught in the net,
xxAttached, we tell ourselves we’re freed.

Here’s a stanza from The Golden Gate by Vikram Seth – 1986 – recounting the thoughts of John, a computer-programmer:

He tuned his thoughts to electronic
Circuitry. This soothed his mind.
He left irregular (moronic)
Sentimentality behind.
He thought of or-gates and of and-gates,
Of ROMs, of nor-gates, and of nand-gates,
Of nanoseconds, megabytes,
And bits and nibbles… but as flights
Of silhouetted birds move cawing
Across the pine-serrated sky,
Dragged from his cove, not knowing why,
He feels an urgent riptide drawing
Him far out, where, caught in the kelp
Of loneliness, he cries for help.

I love the way the very technical language contrasts ironically with the more “traditional” and powerful imagery taken from the natural world.

And here’s a sonnet from Greg Williamson’s book (another Waywiser one), A Most Marvelous Piece of Luck (2008):

Internet

Invented by Al Gore, the Internet
Is chiefly used to view pornography,
Meet homicidal strangers, day trade, bet
On offshore football, view pornography,

Peruse bar graphs of pop sensation Britney
Spear’s permutable décolleté,
And (oh, just pass the crack pipe, okay, Whitney?)
Chat about the life you e-ed away,

Until you download your last stolen file
And Exit Now, Log Off, to retrogress
In the Actual World’s Wide Web of spinneret-
Borne spiders, earthworms, bugs, and stay awhile
In your last known and permanent address,
Your home away from HOME
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxon the Internet.


Of course, it can be objected that the desire to absolutely up-to-date actually opens you to the risk of being dated. Thirty years from now, who will know who Britney Spears is? (But then again, in the age of Google, one could say that that’s not such a big problem.) However, it seems to me that Williamson here is making very inventive and enjoyable use of the new terminology, and finding original metaphors for one of the oldest themes of literature. The possibilities are there, for those who know how to make use of them.

So can anyone else point out other successful uses of the new technology in poetry? Where are the poems of Facebook, Spam, Twittering… ?

And if we can’t find them, maybe we might want to reflect on why poetry is not excited by the brave new world of Microsoft and Apple.

I think the reason the extract of Seth's 1986 poem still works is that it is based on logic. Integrated circuit logic is still relevant. But references that rely on obsolete software and hardware aren't.

I found a 1984 computer poem of mine the other day in an old Swedish literary journal and believe me, I was embarrassed by how ungracefully it had aged.

I also note how it dates a story to have someone "dial a number" or "pick up the receiver" or even "find a telephone booth". Where are telephone booths these days except in museums of technology. A little of that technological name-dropping goes a long way.

Interesting topic, Greg.

Interesting subject, Gregory.

What came to mind right off for me is Bill Coyle's "Airports: An Ode" (which I'm transcribing here without its indentations):

If the poetic line,
as seems to be the case, is
that there could not be any less
poetic places
than major airports, then I guess
I ought in all good conscience to resign
my membership in the great brotherhood,
since I can't help but think these places good.

Granted, the meals are bland
(though laughably expensive)
the travelers bored beyond belief
(though apprehensive);
granted, a soul might come to grief
(and many have) trying to understand
a given airport's kabalistic maze.
Still, these are places worthy of our praise,

worthy because in fact they are
a means by which we realize
the ancient dream of humankind:
not just to travel fast and far
but to ascend into the skies
and, living, leave the world behind.

And if terminals,
their faults being so apparent,
seem lowly means to that high end,
that's still no warrant
for purist bards to condescend.
Let them remember that within these walls,
among kitsch art and commerce, we await
translation to that other, higher state.

Let them remember, too,
that air travel, however
standardized it has grown, remains
a bold endeavor:
Safe though they are as houses, planes
crash upon take-off, plummet from the blue
or serve as flying bombs in an assault.
So let the poets leave off finding fault;

let them, as is meet and right,
recall how, in antiquity,
that engineer extraordinaire,
father of Icarus and flight,
arrived bereft in Italy.
What he did once we daily dare.


As much as I appreciate the craft in this piece, I confess that it leaves me cold. I'm not convinced. It seems rationalized and contrived. Then again, I dislike airports and planes. This poem does nothing to transform my experience of them.

I feel the same way about the Williamson piece: all the material is taken from the most superficial ego-consciousness of the poet. It's amusing in its own way, and that's about it.

In the (?) late 80s The Lady had a piece by Edmund Harwood on 'Word Processors', which included the irritating 'green firefly' of the cursor (still with us) and concluded:

To electronic poets I say this:
Your daisywheel may print a perfect text,
but my old portable with all its faults
does let me think, unblinked-at and unvexed.

Daisywheels? In the museum along with golfballs along with manual portables?

Interesting topic, Greg. Wonder if there were any typewriter poems?

This is the first poem I think of when I think Anne Sexton. Not about typewriters, but ...

That Day

This is the desk I sit at
and this is the desk where I love you too much
and this is the typewriter that sits before me
where yesterday only your body sat before me
with its shoulders gathered in like a Greek chorus,
with its tongue like a king making up rules as he goes,
with its tongue quite openly like a cat lapping milk,
with its tongue - both of us coiled in its slippery life.
That was yesterday, that day.

That was the day of your tongue,
your tongue that came from your lips,
two openers, half animals, half birds
caught in the doorway of your heart.
That was the day I followed the king's rules,
passing by your red veins and your blue veins,
my hands down the backbone, down the quick like a firepole,
hands between legs where you display your inner knowledge,
where diamond mines are buried and come forth to bury,
come forth more sudden than some reconstructed city.
It is complete within seconds, that monument.
The blood runs underground yet brings forth a tower.
A multitude should gather for such an edifice.
For a miracle one stands in line and throws confetti.
Surely The Press is here looking for headlines.
Surely someone should carry a banner on the sidewalk.
If a bridge is constructed doesn't the mayer cut a ribbon?
If a phenomenon arrives shouldn't the Magi come bearing gifts?
Yesterday was the day I bore gifts for your gift
and came from the valley to meet you on the pavement.
That was yesterday, that day.

That was the day of your face,
your face after love, close to the pillow, a lullaby.
Half asleep beside me letting the old fashioned rocker stop,
our breath became one, became a child-breath together,
while my fingers drew little o's on your shut eyes,
while my fingers drew little smiles on your mouth,
while I drew I LOVE YOU on your chest and its drummer
and whispered, "Wake up!" and you mumbled in your sleep,
"Sh. We're driving to Cape Cod. We're heading for the Bourne
Bridge. We're circling around the Bourne Circle." Bourne!
Then I knew you in your dream and prayed of our time
that I would be pierced and you would take root in me
and that I might bring forth your born, might bear
the you or the ghost of you in my little household.
Yesterday I did not want to be borrowed
but this is the typewriter that sits before me
and love is where yesterday is at.

I may not be the only fan of Robert W. Service. As a kid I could recite (and so could my dad) The Shooting of Dan McGrew and The Cremation of Sam McGee.


I used to think a pot of ink
Held magic in its fluid,
And I would ply a pen when I
Was hoary a a Druid;
But as I scratch my silver thatch
My battered old Corona
Calls out to me as plaintively
As dying Desdemona.

"For old time's sake give me a break:
To you I've been as loyal
As ever could an Underwood,
Or Remington or Royal.
The globe we've spanned together and
Two million words, maybe,
For you I've tapped - it's time you rapped
A rhyme or two for me.

"I've seen you sit and smoke and spit
With expletives profane,
Then tear with rage the virgin page
I tendered you in vain.
I've watched you glare in dull despair
Through hours of brooding thought,
Then with a shout bang gaily out
The 'word unique' you sought.

"I've heard you groan and grunt and moan
That rhyme's a wretched fetter;
That after all you're just a small
Fat-headed verse-begetter;
You'd balance me upon your knee
Like any lady friend,
Then with a sigh you'd lay me by
For weeks and weeks on end.

"I've known when you were mighty blue
And hammered me till dawn,
Dire poverty! But I would be
The last thing you would pawn.
Days debt-accurst! Then at its worst
The sky, behold, would clear;
A poem sold, the garret cold
Would leap to light and cheer.

"You've toted me by shore and sea
From Mexico to Maine;
From Old Cathay to Mandalay,
From Samarkand to Spain.
You've thumped me in the battle's din
And pounded me in peace;
By air and land you've lugged me and
Your shabby old valise.

"But now my keys no more with ease
To your two fingers yield;
With years of use my joints are loose,
With wear of flood and field.
And even you are slipping too:
You're puffy, stiff and grey:
Old Sport, we're done, our race is run -
Why not call it a day?"

Why not? You've been, poor old machine!
My tried and faithful friend.
With fingertip your keys I'll flip
Serenely to the end.
For even though you're stiff and slow,
No other will I buy.
And though each word be wan and blurred
I'll tap you till I die.

Television

Hug me, mother of noise,
Find me a hiding place.
I am afraid of my voice.
I do not like my face.

xxx- Anne Stevenson

I read that the phrase came from John Updike.

It's rather odd. Even yearly anthologies can be lacking. Trying to be timeless, to write for posterity, is understandable, but not at the expense of insulating oneself from the present and things that we all share. I'm surprised how few cell-phones appear in poems, given that people use them hours a day. Here's my haiku contribution

"Lonely Hearts"

Seeking Formalist.
Must be SA, must have used
iPad in a sonnet.

Apropos the topic of this thread, I've been remembering a passage from an essay I wrote on Edwin Muir, published in the Hudson Review several years ago.

I still agree with what Muir says, although I don't believe this means that the terminology of technological innovations can't fit into poetry somehow. I don't think Muir would either:

For me, that bit about essential human identity becoming "indistinct" in the constant flux of technological change is key.

It's terrible to have only the vaguest memory of a poem that might be pertinent here. Mary Jo Salter has a book entitled A Phone Call to the Future, and I think it's the title poem of that volume I'm remembering. As I recall it, the poem dredges up memories of old technologies (like the rotary phone) that have become so obsolete they've slipped from daily consciousness. She makes use, I think, of the surprise of recalling them and of the reader's recognition of how much has changed in such a circumscribed set of habits.

Does anybody have that poem, or a link to it?

Thanks, everyone, for joining in this thread. I can see that it raises perplexity as much as it does enthusiasm - or perhaps even more the former than the latter. As Janice points out, the real risk is of seeming dated. Nothing dates faster than the absolutely up-to-date - not a paradox but a truism, I guess. The examples you give are pertinent; just the other day I came across a poem which referred to lovers' quarrels ending in phones being slammed down. Even that sounds a little quaint now.

Thanks for the typewriter poems - particularly the Service one, which strikes me as a lot more enjoyable than some of his more famous gung-ho ones.

Andrew, I like the Bill Coyle poem a lot more than you do, I guess. Obviously he's taken on a big challenge; one of Douglas Adams's book begins with the sentence: "It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on Earth has ever produced the expression 'as pretty as an airport'." But if I like Coyle's poem more than you do it is almost bound to be due to the fact that I still (I mean still since childhood) find air-travel very exciting; I really do get a thrill out of rising so improbably from the ground, even though I do it now pretty regularly.

By the way, the Williamson poem really needs to be seen in context for its full effect; it's part of an book-length sequence of sonnets, in which he plays a series of amazing linguistic, tonal and metaphorical riffs on the sonnet-form. I thoroughly recommend it and ask you not to be put off by what may seem a certain glibness of tone here. I think there's something Shelleyan in the way he adopts the language of science and technology in a number of these poems, playing with it and transforming it into new forms of imagery.

Tim, I have now Googled the phrase "roadkill on the information highway" and what I discovered makes me feel that I am in fact the least-competent person to treat this subject. I had never heard the phrase before and so was sure Harrison had invented it; I now see that it's become a cliché. I haven't yet managed to track it down to Updike as its source but defer to your superior knowledge.

Andrew (again), thanks for the Edwin Muir quotation. Wise words. Perhaps I ought to say that I didn't start this thread out of any proselytising zeal, eager to convert everyone to the new poetic language of nanobytes and Facebook; it was curiosity as much as anything else. I am, after all, very fond of the works of Wendell Berry and I think it'll be a long time before we get him dropping images taken from I.T. into his works.

But I still remain curious to see if anyone else has any successful examples of such poetry. I remember coming across somewhere a very witty poem based on the language of spam. Does anyone know what I'm talking about?

Oh, and there's the villanelle of the answering-machine; does anyone know this one? (Sorry, I don't have a very efficient filing-system - either in my office or in my brain.)

Maryann, cross-posted with you. Of course, what a pertinent example. Here are the opening lines:


A PHONE CALL TO THE FUTURE
Mary Jo Salter

Who says science fiction
is only set in the future?
After a while, the story that looks least
believable is the past.
The console television with three channels.
Black-and-white picture. Manual controls:
the dial clicks when you turn it, like the oven.
You have to get up and walk somewhere to change things.
You have to leave the house to mail a letter.


And it ends (so pertinently for this thread):


That's what I mean. We were Martians. Nothing's stranger
than our patience, our humanity, inhumanity.
Our worrying about robots. Earplug cell phones
that make us seem to be walking about like loonies
talking to ourselves. Perhaps we are.

All of it was so quaint. And I was there.
Poetry was there; we tried to write it.

There was a Spectator competition that overlaps with this topic, for what it's worth. Here are some of the entries folks around here were working on:

http://www.ablemuse.com/erato/showth...highlight=2613

Thanks, Roger. I see I even intervened on the thread, so I should have remembered it myself.

I'll have to get a copy of that Williamson collection, Gregory. I can see that a poem like the sonnet of his you posted in this thread could have quite a different feel in context.

Well, as I was tossing and turning unable to sleep last night, I thought of another contemporary poet who has worked with the language that's the subject of this thread: Richard Burns, the British poet I reviewed for Semicerchio (a mag. that Gregory edits for, folks). His collection The Manager (2001) is a book-length dramatic monologue in the voice of an executive who works for a multinational corporation. Burns uses the fiction in part to explore current idioms and jargon, as well as various dissociated mental states that go along with contemporary life. I liked this book a lot. I'll type some in below to give a flavor of the whole. Burns (also known as Richard Berengarten, by the way) calls the form he uses here "verse paragraphs." One of the things that strikes me about Burns's way of doing it is that the form allows him to go all over the place, free associate, disassociate. Also, the dramatic monologue framework gives the material (at least, in the course of the whole book) pathos.

and:

and (this last one using the form and typeface of a fax):

Yes, though people still write historical novels. I don't know why poets might avoid mentioning tech more than novelists do. Some tech merely offers new ways to do old things (FAX replacing pony-express) but others affect big issues. Medical developments affect childlessness, our notions of death (borderline cases increase), our notions of identity (transplants, brain-changing drugs and surgery, sex changing). Cell phones and video phones let us more easily be alone without being lonely. Space and Time aren't what they used to be.

Note also that the UK has Informationist Poetry

I can't recall where I read that - The Dark Horse? The source may well remain unknown. Updike's an unlikely inventor, I'd say.

Perhaps the more interesting effects are deeper, more radical, than content - Flarf, HyperText poems, etc.

I've wondered how much poetry has been affected by setting -- if haiku or villanelles, for example, came about in part because they had an elegant look on paper of the size and style used back then. HyperText poems may enjoy only a brief time on the cutting edge as technology changes and improves.

Seems like most of the poems that use high-tech references are light verse...Light Quareterlty probably has many in its pages. I wrote a ballade once with the refrain "So would you kindly put your cell phone down", which LQ printed.

Topical references are more of a problem. I used Brad Pitt once in a poem as an example of a great catch, but on the theory that I'd still be read in a hundred years, later substituted the words "a rich man."

dipshit comment deleted

Before I sent in my Nemerov Award entry in November 2009, I went back and forth on one line:
"Last night I saw my daughter's MySpace page,"
"Last night I saw my daughter's Facebook page,"

I went with MySpace. Dad nab it! I finally make the finalist pool, and my poem is outdated before it's even published!

This from post #1 reminds me of something Aldous Huxley wrote about his first visit to America. Can't remember the exact wording, but it was something to the effect that he initially thought all Americans were in the habit of talking to themselves, but he found out they were only chewing gum.

This would seem to be the most relevant answer to the questions I put in my first post. The Wikipedia article is very short, however, and I have to say that Googling hasn't thrown up much more information on this movement. I had certainly never heard of it in relation to Don Paterson or Kathleen Jamie. It seems to me that the term has not really taken off - and maybe the same is true of the movement itself.

However, having said that, I did some Googling on the apparent founder of the movement, Richard Price, and came across this webpage , which contains a very touching poem of his. It's not an "informationist" poem, but it does suggest he's a poet worth knowing. I wonder if anyone knows anything about him? Or about Informationist Poetry?

I like that Richard Price poem a lot, Gregory. I'm not getting the connection between that and the Informationist "manifesto" (if that's what it is). I was also surprised to see Kathleen Jamie in that list since I associate her with poetry full of imagery from nature and the outdoors.

I know little about Informationist Poetry, but Paterson and especially Jamie must be peripheral to it. I saw Richard Price in the "Identity Parade" anthology and marked him down as one to keep my eyes on. His poems in that book looked more like I'd expect "Informationist Poetry" to be - lots of Information presented using juxtaposition.

Gregory, in answer to your original question in this thread, "Where are the poems of Facebook," etc., another one I just remembered is by our own Maryann C., a fine poem called "MySpace Invader," that's in her chapbook Dissonance. I really like the closing lines, which themselves are a comment on this subject:

What strangeness will engulf our lives when they
smile out of every pixel, wild and golden?
I need to know what world I will be old in.

Thanks, Andrew! If we hadn't disabled it, I'd feel a terrible temptation to use the Facebook-like "Like" function included in this board's software :)

The Iron Horse Literary Review was recently collecting submissions for a Facebook poems issue. I'll check when it will appear.

It dawns on me that I've used cell phones in at least two poems. Nemo Hill's "Um Portugues," which appeared in 14 by 14, focuses on a phone message machine.

Shortly after 9/11 there was a lot of prose about the last phone messages left by the dead. Does anyone recall pertinent poems?

Yes, the answering-machine does seem to lend itself to poetry. Didn't Tim Murphy write one about Helen Hecht, who could never bring herself to change the message on her machine after Anthony Hecht had died? Or am I inventing that?

Thanks, Andrew, for posting those lovely last few lines of Maryann's poem. Could we see the rest?

Sure!

MySpace Invader

Not stalking. It's research. I have to learn
this uncouth tongue, this wOOt and LssT and pwn.
I need to understand. Who are these people
who've friended you? who turn the ether purple
with their rank gossip and their splatball anger?
who youtube every crook of a middle finger?
who post and link and tag and thread the world
so knotted every truth I know goes snarled?

Small wonder if I lurk. A blogger's ruse
or facebook feint tomorrow might disclose
new-ravelled rules, enweb new mystery.
What strangeness will engulf our lives when they
smile out of every pixel, wild and golden?
I need to know what world I will be old in.

--Maryann Corbett

Thanks, Andrew - and, of course, Maryann. That's a perfect example of what I was looking for in this thread.

By the way, Maryann, I see that with the strategy of slant-rhymes you've cleverly avoided the issue of how the word "pwn" is pronounced.

Thanks for posting the poem, Andrew. The "leetspeak" (officially, "l33tspeak") issues might be worth talking about, Gregory, and also the fleeting popularity of social networking sites.

When the poem was in proofs at Comstock Review (early 2008?) the editor wrote me a note saying that his middle-school-age son had approved of seeing l33tspeak in a poem. The strangely spelled slang is not much seen now, at least not by me. I don't know if that's only because the young people I know have passed beyond that, or because its popularity has shifted or waned.

And when I wrote the poem, it was titled "LJ Stalker," LJ being short for LiveJournal. But commenters steered me to "MySpace Invader" both because it was clearer and because MySpace was the up-and-coming site. It's long since been superseded by FaceBook.

So here I am, wondering whether I should take this dated three-year-old poem out of the book manuscript that has been making the rounds :)

I'm going right back to the beginning of this thread. I had no idea that Tennyson's grooves referred to railways. Ha dhe never travelled by one? Hadn't they got as far as Lincolnshire. Having said that I think Tennyson's image works very well, worlds spinning in preordained grooves. change not up to us, it's all rather Darwinian, don't you think?
Auden as a boy was muich more interested in machines than in poetry, though I'm not sure how much that comes out - possibly in 'Night Mail'.

Of course the problem is that most of us poets dont know much about technology. I've only just learned how to send text messages.

Everybody who gets e-mail endures spam--no technological expertise required! Going back to the beginning of the thread, I see that Gregory asks where the spam poems are. Here's one, by Mike Stocks, who judged our Sonnet Bakeoff back in 2006:

419

Dear Friend, have no suspiciousments or fear.
My name is Budwa Charles, attorney to
the President Kabila of Zaire,
assassinated in attempted coup.

My client (late) had trusted my good name
of (US) 50 million dollar stash.
No family is come forwarded to claim,
and now I must secure abroad the cash.

On you I have esteeming profile to
a triple ‘A’ of highest finance sense,
and would put half in best account you own,

and profit 12.5 per cent to you.
Please send, in speedy highest confidence,
the details of address and fax and phone.

I have read the above Mike Stocks poem somewhere and I really, really loved it. Thanks Maryann for posting this.

I've got Auden's collected out of the library just now, and I'm looking at 'Night Mail.' It seems remarkably untechnological--so much so that I have to figure out what sort of conveyance is carrying the mail. The picture of a train appears gradually:

I.

This is the night mail crossing the Border,
Bringing the cheque and the postal order,

Letters for the rich, letters for the poor,
The shop at the corner, the girl next door.

Pulling up Beattock, a steady climb:
The gradient's against her, but she's on time.

Past cotton-grass and moorland boulder,
Shovelling white steam over her shoulder,

Snorting noisily, she passes
Silent miles of wind-bent grasses.

Birds turn their heads as she approaches,
Stare from bushes at her blank-faced coaches.

Sheep-dogs cannot turn her course;
They slumber on with paws across.

In the farm she passes no one wakes,
But a jug in the bedroom gently shakes.

John, I've just checked in the Ricks edition of Tennyson and there is this note: "T. comments: 'When I went by the first train from Liverpool to Manchester (1830) I thought that the wheels ran in a groove. It was a black night, and there was such a vast crowd round the train at the station that we could not see the wheels. Then I made this line.' "

What you say about the image, of course, is true, and that's what makes it memorable. But it is slightly a pity that it isn't technically correct, since Tennyson's speaker is here supposed to be coming back to the idea of living in the present day with its steamships and railways (specifically mentioned) rather than escaping to "summer isles of Eden lying in dark-purple spheres of sea".

Thanks, Maryann, for the Mike Stocks sonnet. That was one of the poems I was referring to but couldn't remember who wrote it.

Interesting the references to Auden here. I guess he was vaguely associated with the so-called "Pylon poets" I mentioned at the start of this thread but actually his early poems are more memorable for their pictures of deserted, derelict industries than for celebrations of the machine. Here is a section from an early poem which ties in very neatly with the Tennyson, since he is using the same stanza form as "Locksley Hall":

Gregory, your comment about Auden’s technological imagery not really being a “celebration of the machine” made me wonder what in English or American poetry would have been comparable to Italian Futurists--aside from their Fascist politics, that is.

Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto was mentioned in the papers a lot last year, its 100th anniversary. I have a friend in the area, a 90-year-old widow of a second-generation Futurist painter, Mino della Site, who did painting after painting of airplanes. The things still sell a lot.

I guess that writing about high tech now would be comparable to writing about machinery then. Only no doubt the rate of change is faster with electronic and digital innovations.

Spender wrote a poem about pylons. He says they are 'like nude giant girls that have no secret'. Well, he always was a bloody fool, wasn't he? He also wrote one called 'The Express' which makes you think he had never been on a train.

Pylon popsies
 

John, it was 'bare like giant nude girls that have no secret' rather than 'nude giant girls'.

The giant nude girls have birds' nests in their hair sometimes, and in Spain whopping great stork nurseries. Curious

Pylon oopsies
 

Many apologies, John. Robin Skelton's Poetry of the Thirties (1964) has come my way, and there the line is 'Bare like nude, giant girls that have no secret'.

Never trust the web, where it was quoted as 'giant nude girls', unless Spender revised the original at some point between 1933 and 1964.