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