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