There Doesn't Seem to be Anything Here
 

Are there any interesting poems or poets that engage with the revolution in our experience which computers and personal computers have created? It struck me, while reading Matt Q’s excellent “Seven years lost in a lab”, in Non-Met, that I don’t find poems that explore the way that internet life has changed rapidly what it means to be human. I tried the Poetry Foundation “Browse Poems” site, which I usually find very useful, but found few results. Has there been a thread on this topic before?

I note that Bill Lantry's interesting "There Doesn't Seem to be Anything Here" was, generally, poorly received. Is there a lurking predjudice among poets that computer/internet life is off-topic in some way?

Hi Steve,
Google Haiku error messages. I'd attach a link but I'm on my phone. You may remember these. They capture well the impact and in some perspectives the triviality of computer word-processing. The magnitude of the information revolution is a huge subject, possibly hard to grasp in that it includes developing storage, calculation, processing, and connectivity capacities apparently exceeding our as yet unexhausted brains. But life goes on. Musings on new technologies are quickly dated in a world characterized by rapid technological change.

Did you ever read Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker? He evokes a poignant nostalgia for our technological wealth from the perspective of a future in which it is all lost. The futuristic pidgin he creates includes scraps of uncomprehended technological vocabulary.

Fred Turner is very interested in science and technology. His epic Genesis involves combining information science with genetics to terraform Mars. Highly recommended! The Sybil's eternal religion disclosed at the end incorporates and illuminates the available toolbox. It would be worth reviewing Turner's oeuvre to pull together the information science and other scientific themes.

I'm not sure how this technology would be supposed to impact on the writing of verse. I write directly onto a computer but I haven't noticed it makes any difference to the texture of what I write.

The greatest technological innovation of the last two hundred years was surely the railway? The internet doesn't compare.

But perhaps I am missing something, being old and all.

But Perhaps I Am Missing Something, Being Old And All

Well, as a title, John, that's a good wry start for a poem dealing with the subject in question.

Nemo

This poem predates the Internet, but I've often thought of it as a kind of forerunner:


The Cool Web

Children are dumb to say how hot the day is,
How hot the scent is of the summer rose,
How dreadful the black wastes of evening sky,
How dreadful the tall soldiers drumming by.
But we have speech, to chill the angry day,
And speech, to dull the rose's cruel scent.
We spell away the overhanging night,
We spell away the soldiers and the fright.
There's a cool web of language winds us in,
Retreat from too much joy or too much fear:
We grow sea-green at last and coldly die
In brininess and volubility.
But if we let our tongues lose self-possession,
Throwing off language and its watery clasp
Before our death, instead of when death comes,
Facing the wide glare of the children's day,
Facing the rose, the dark sky and the drums,
We shall go mad no doubt and die that way.

xxxxx- Robert Graves

Steve, look up Flarf poetry. I’m not a fan, but it’s built on Google searches. I’d argue that the revival of found poetry in general is also a result of increased internet use.

It’s likely that Elliptical poems were a response to the internet age. The individual poet disappears, to be replaced by a bunch of random-seeming facts whose connection is unclear—precisely what we experience while browsing the internet.

The spread of local poetic movements across borders is also an internet phenomenon. The haiku community in the US is smitten with gendai (“modern”) haiku from Japan, with internet-only journals like Roadrunner leading the charge. The content of these poems—surreal, dream-like—seems to have some resonance in a world of special effects and CG films.

I think Alicia Stallings parodied internet lingo in a poem built around uses of the word “like.”

First, I don't think Bill's poem was poorly received at all... There were workshop suggestions, to be sure, but it wasn't really panned.

Second, as others have mentioned, there are many new "forms" of poetry that have emerged solely out of Internet usage. Flarf was mentioned, but Poegles are another variation. Not my cup of tea, but they exist.

I have a few A.I. poems, one of which was in Rattle a few years ago. I've also written about online dating and other "modern" computer-based themes. I suspect many folks here have as well (I've seen lots of poems that mention Facebook etc.)...it's just that it becomes more of a backdrop issue than a front-and-center one, because it's now part of our society. The other side of the coin is that the Internet has only been around in a popular sense for a little over twenty years. As ubiquitous as it is, it's still "new" in a sense. As the decades go on, we'll probably be able to look back and see that there were quite a few contemporary poems on this topic...just ones that we might not know about at the moment.

What a wonderful poem that one of Robert Graves is. He did go mad of course. Stood in the sea and watched young girls bathing. I wouldn't mind that.

Thanks, Steve, but that wasn't really a poor reception. Usually I get something more along the lines of "You suck, your verse sucks, even your soul sucks eggs, either give up writing entirely, or write exactly the way I do." With a strong emphasis on that last point... ;)

This is true of every workshop I've ever participated in. It gets amusing after a while. There are two standard anecdotes. In the first, a respondent says of a new poem "This one really sucks. It's nowhere near as good as the one you did three weeks ago." Then you go back, and discover the same respondent had savagely trashed the now three week old poem.

In the second, the respondent says something like "If you just did this one thing differently, you'd be a good poet..." Write looser. Write tighter. Be honest. Make stuff up. Best one I ever got: "You need more discipline and humility. If you ever want to be a good poet, you should join the Navy!" ;)

Tee hee! But enough with the jokes. On to the subject, which is close to my heart. When people write about technology and poetry, they tend to fall into cliches and PR stunts. "Twitter poems - aren't they cool? You could write an article about that..." Or, "Let's print out the entire internet, store the printed pages in a warehouse in Mexico, and call it a poetry project. That'll get us some press." Or "I'm a white guy, but I got Michael Brown's autopsy report off the internet. I'm going to read it verbatim in public, and call the whole thing poetry."

The aesthetic problems have to do with purpose, emphasis, and experience. One time, during an interview, I got called out for writing nature poems, even though I live in a large city. But I do write about lived experience... I'm just lucky enough to live next to an island of nature in the middle of an urban environment.

And there's the problem with technocentric poems: they're often not about the experience, but about the technology. A better example, I think , is "April Lindner is in Moderate Traffic," if you remember that one. It was filled with technology, but it wasn't *about* technology, it was about driving to the feed store, and what was going on as I drove.

Then there's the question of audience. No matter what we may think of ourselves as a group on this site, we're not really representative. We're a little bit technophobic, in the same way the people on facebook are. And more than a little behind the curve. Yesterday, over there, a site member asked 'should I switch between windows and mac?' The responses were predictable, filled with mythology, marketing, and irrational prejudice. But here's the point: not a single respondent suggested he switch to linux. Most of his friends are writers and readers of poetry. In such an environment, how are poems incorporating technology going to be received?

It's worse, though, on the other side of the divide. I've been talking about poetry as code, and code as poetry, for years. One of my fiction-writer friends even wrote a book on the subject. But coders aren't well known for pausing, taking a step back, and asking aloud "What are we really up to here?" In general, they're more interested in just getting the darned thing to work. They're more interested in practice than poetics. And unless you become one of them, and watch closely, you'll never discover their secrets, and never understand what they themselves call "trying to get prana through the wire," or 'the soul of the new machine."

This is not to say it's all negative. The field is wide open. We *will* get there. And it will be good. We're just not going to get there as quickly as I used to think...

Best,

Bill

The real potential for poetry about the Internet lies, I think, in how the Internet has affected human interactions. For instance, I just included "Status Update" (referring to Facebook) by Julie Kane in an on-campus poetry reading I put together called "Funny Women." Light verse is often where the responses to the Internet get started. Later I expect to see them appearing more often in serious verse. We're all caught in the Web now, for better and worse.

Susan

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.

Well of course it does, Brian. I know that already from the crap computers spew out about global warming. You could produce much the same result as these sonnets without going near a computer. And I'm (almost) sure computers (except the one in your head) have nothing to do with your talent as a competition winner.

John, don't you believe global warming is real?

It depends on what you mean by real. The planet warms from time to time. At other times it cools. Britain was much warmer in medieval times than it is now and colder in Victorian times. The planet has not warmed since 2000. Check that, Janice. It is true. Mind you, you'll have to check with someone who tells you the truth. Steer well clear of the University of East Anglia and Al Gore.

Anecdotal note. I remember it as much colder in the 1940s and 50s than it is now. I remember going to school when the outside temperature was 16 farenheit. Nothing like that nowadays, praise the Lord.

John, you have firm and utterly uninformed opinion about absolutely everything, don't you. Give it a rest, and go putter about your small corner.

Nemo

Weak case. Slander the plaintiff's attorney. Why do you guys get so cross when people don't agree with you? Why do you SHOUT so much?

I take it none of you live in Northern Canada. Thought not. Why are the polar bears not all dead? They are thriving. Why is the Arctic ice not melting. It isn't.

I expect you are all much too busy to listen for twelve minutes. But you might try The Skeptics' Case in 12 minutes. This is a guy who changed his mind. Imagine that. He changed his mind.

The day I believe anything that comes from the UN is the day I meet God at the bottom of the garden. The UN is a political organisation. It roundly condemns Israel. That OK with you? It roundly condemns the USA on many things. That OK with you?

Oh and quite irrelevantly. I used to be a conservative but I changed my mind.

Yes, John, there have always been climatic changes leading to ice-ages and to thaws, but that was a natural cycle from which the planet recovered. This time, with all our technological knowhow, we're pushing it to the point of no return. Coral reefs developed over hundreds of millions of years, and managed to survive the natural fluctuations of climate. But now, thanks to us, 95% of coral may die over the next few decades.

As to your second point, I don't know the basis for your remarkable assertions, but here's a thought for you:

"Polar bears were added to the list of threatened species and will receive special protection under U.S. law. In his statement, Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne noted that the decline of Arctic sea ice is the greatest threat to the bears."

The article is about a UN report, but it is not based on UN studies. The UN report "was based, amongst others, on three datasets - Hadcrut, NOAA and NASA - and the analysis from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts."

The folks at NASA have some credibility, having put men on the moon. But wait, as a climate change denier, you probably think the so-called moon landing took place on a sound stage in LA.

As I continue to think about the climate change question, I will be sure to ask myself, "Whom should I believe? Ninety-seven percent of the world's climate scientists, or John Whitworth?"

Ah, but Roger, don't forget those early photos, hastily suppressed by NASA, that showed an old signboard just behind Armstrong's left ear. It was pretty faded, but you could still make out "Bates Motel."

I see none of you has gone where I said you should go. But then it hasn't been twelve minutes, has it? And what has 97% of scientists got to do with it? What are the areas of expertise of these scientists? Atre the other 3% all MAD scientsts?

The inuit don't agree with you about polar bears, Brian. But, hell, what do they know? They just live there. They don't have all these degrees. Nevertheless, I wouldn't diss the inuit, if I were you. But I'm sure you weren't going to.

The logic of this argument is off. If polar bears currently thrive in a warmer climate, all this means is that the impact of global warming on polar bear numbers wasn't accurately predicte. It doesn't mean that that the climate isn't warmer!

Are polar bears thriving in warmer temperatures? Reading this article in the Telegraph it seems that a) the increase in polar bear numbers may be attributable to increased conservation work and b) there are politics at work: those funding the research in question have a vested interest in hunting bears, and hence in the numbers being high. So who knows. Notice that both sides agree that the climate is changing, they just disagree on it's impact on the polar bears, and consequently whether hunting should be allowed.

-Matt

An increase in the number of polar bears coming into human settlements in the far north could be interpreted in various ways, John, including:

1.) a polar bear population so robustly healthy that it's expanding farther south than it used to, thus impacting human communities more than formerly.

2.) a big decrease in the availability of polar bears' usual northern food sources (e.g., ice floes from which the bears can hunt seals and walruses), thus forcing them to seek alternative food sources in human settlements.

Since sales of polar bear pelts and parts can have a significant positive impact on household incomes in the far north, it is unsurprising that interpretation #1 seems to be more popular among residents of the far north than interpretation #2.

The Inuit are as human as you and I, and therefore are probably as eager to interpret evidence in a way that supports what they want to believe as you and I.

How insistent you all are in believing the worst. You remind me of flaggellent monks. It's all going to be all right, you know. It really is.

The Daily Telegraph? I wouldn't believe much in the Daily Telegraph unless it comes from Christopher Booker or that guy the Beeb sacked for being right. If it were the Mail now...

I looked for a Daily Mail article on polar bear woes for you, John, and I discovered it's far worse than I thought. You're right--it's better not to research this stuff at all.

Trust in God and take short views, Julie.

Remember, the world is NOT going to cut carbon emissions so we will know whether it will matter. Or my children will know. Not a particularly doomy pair, I'm glad to say.

All will be well and all manner of things will be well. A good website to cheer you all up is notalotofpeopleknowthat.com.

I suppose that's the closest you'll come to admitting you don't actually have any factual support for the arguments you make up as you go along.

John - it you could figure out something as simple as providing a working link to a web page - which you either cannot, or can't be bothered with - I might have a trifle more patience with your constant blather. But you can't figure out how to set up a link (something 97% or more of us can do without difficulty, when we aren't spreading horror stories about global warming), and when I look for the web site you refer us to what I get is "Bad Request - Invalid Hostname", it's all of a piece. It's just not that as soon as you get off the subject of poetry you so often don't know what you're talking about - it's that you bray about it so loudly and so frequently.

To answer your question, apart from pointing out that 97% is a lot more than 3% and the burden is on you to explain why you support the view of the 3%, the fact of the matter is that even the 3% are dominated by people who are being paid by special interests to create junk science. One of the leading and most-cited climate deniers, Wei-Hock Soon, was recently exposed as having lied about receiving money from various oil companies and the Koch brothers (American billionaires who fund candidates and force them to withdraw support from alternative energy). It turns out he has accepted over $1.2 million to drum up doubt about man-made climate change. He accepted this money for publishing "scientific" papers in journals that have rules against publishing papers from people who accept money, and he fraudulently hid that fact from the journals. Here's an article on the subject. So no, the 3% aren't "mad scientists," they are shills for vested interests that perceive their financial interests as being threatened by the well-accepted scientific consensus about climate change. And it's precisely that kind of shilling that has taken in otherwise intelligent people like you who ultimately, faced with the facts, have nothing to say but "don't worry, be happy."

Oh come on, Michael. Try a bit harder. I just got it.

And as for people taking money, Roger, you've got the wrong guys. But it's no good. You WILL believe what you will believe. .

The East Anglian professors lied. Al Gore lied. But hey, they lied for a good reason.

John, did you read the article I linked to? I provided you with sources for my claims. You just came up with a superior and (some might say) smugly dismissive bromide about people believing what they will believe, with the implicit suggestion that you alone are exempt from that human foible. The fact is, I don't "want" to believe in climate change. It's a terrible thing. It is you, with your "don't worry, it will all be okay" attitude, who are believing what you want to believe. I think you understand that intelligent people can only roll their eyes at such willful ignorance. You're not even engaging in a discussion. You're simply insisting you are right without any facts to support you, and when the few facts you have attempted to rely upon (like the bears) are conclusively rebutted, you don't even acknowledge your error or seem to think it matters in the least.