[Gregory Dowling]

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.