[Gregory Dowling]

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.)