[Andrew Frisardi]

Interesting subject, Gregory.

What came to mind right off for me is Bill Coyle's "Airports: An Ode" (which I'm transcribing here without its indentations):

If the poetic line,
as seems to be the case, is
that there could not be any less
poetic places
than major airports, then I guess
I ought in all good conscience to resign
my membership in the great brotherhood,
since I can't help but think these places good.

Granted, the meals are bland
(though laughably expensive)
the travelers bored beyond belief
(though apprehensive);
granted, a soul might come to grief
(and many have) trying to understand
a given airport's kabalistic maze.
Still, these are places worthy of our praise,

worthy because in fact they are
a means by which we realize
the ancient dream of humankind:
not just to travel fast and far
but to ascend into the skies
and, living, leave the world behind.

And if terminals,
their faults being so apparent,
seem lowly means to that high end,
that's still no warrant
for purist bards to condescend.
Let them remember that within these walls,
among kitsch art and commerce, we await
translation to that other, higher state.

Let them remember, too,
that air travel, however
standardized it has grown, remains
a bold endeavor:
Safe though they are as houses, planes
crash upon take-off, plummet from the blue
or serve as flying bombs in an assault.
So let the poets leave off finding fault;

let them, as is meet and right,
recall how, in antiquity,
that engineer extraordinaire,
father of Icarus and flight,
arrived bereft in Italy.
What he did once we daily dare.


As much as I appreciate the craft in this piece, I confess that it leaves me cold. I'm not convinced. It seems rationalized and contrived. Then again, I dislike airports and planes. This poem does nothing to transform my experience of them.

I feel the same way about the Williamson piece: all the material is taken from the most superficial ego-consciousness of the poet. It's amusing in its own way, and that's about it.

[Jerome Betts]

In the (?) late 80s The Lady had a piece by Edmund Harwood on 'Word Processors', which included the irritating 'green firefly' of the cursor (still with us) and concluded:

To electronic poets I say this:
Your daisywheel may print a perfect text,
but my old portable with all its faults
does let me think, unblinked-at and unvexed.

Daisywheels? In the museum along with golfballs along with manual portables?

Interesting topic, Greg. Wonder if there were any typewriter poems?

[Janice D. Soderling]

This is the first poem I think of when I think Anne Sexton. Not about typewriters, but ...

That Day

This is the desk I sit at
and this is the desk where I love you too much
and this is the typewriter that sits before me
where yesterday only your body sat before me
with its shoulders gathered in like a Greek chorus,
with its tongue like a king making up rules as he goes,
with its tongue quite openly like a cat lapping milk,
with its tongue - both of us coiled in its slippery life.
That was yesterday, that day.

That was the day of your tongue,
your tongue that came from your lips,
two openers, half animals, half birds
caught in the doorway of your heart.
That was the day I followed the king's rules,
passing by your red veins and your blue veins,
my hands down the backbone, down the quick like a firepole,
hands between legs where you display your inner knowledge,
where diamond mines are buried and come forth to bury,
come forth more sudden than some reconstructed city.
It is complete within seconds, that monument.
The blood runs underground yet brings forth a tower.
A multitude should gather for such an edifice.
For a miracle one stands in line and throws confetti.
Surely The Press is here looking for headlines.
Surely someone should carry a banner on the sidewalk.
If a bridge is constructed doesn't the mayer cut a ribbon?
If a phenomenon arrives shouldn't the Magi come bearing gifts?
Yesterday was the day I bore gifts for your gift
and came from the valley to meet you on the pavement.
That was yesterday, that day.

That was the day of your face,
your face after love, close to the pillow, a lullaby.
Half asleep beside me letting the old fashioned rocker stop,
our breath became one, became a child-breath together,
while my fingers drew little o's on your shut eyes,
while my fingers drew little smiles on your mouth,
while I drew I LOVE YOU on your chest and its drummer
and whispered, "Wake up!" and you mumbled in your sleep,
"Sh. We're driving to Cape Cod. We're heading for the Bourne
Bridge. We're circling around the Bourne Circle." Bourne!
Then I knew you in your dream and prayed of our time
that I would be pierced and you would take root in me
and that I might bring forth your born, might bear
the you or the ghost of you in my little household.
Yesterday I did not want to be borrowed
but this is the typewriter that sits before me
and love is where yesterday is at.

[Janice D. Soderling]

I may not be the only fan of Robert W. Service. As a kid I could recite (and so could my dad) The Shooting of Dan McGrew and The Cremation of Sam McGee.

My Typewriter

I used to think a pot of ink
Held magic in its fluid,
And I would ply a pen when I
Was hoary a a Druid;
But as I scratch my silver thatch
My battered old Corona
Calls out to me as plaintively
As dying Desdemona.

"For old time's sake give me a break:
To you I've been as loyal
As ever could an Underwood,
Or Remington or Royal.
The globe we've spanned together and
Two million words, maybe,
For you I've tapped - it's time you rapped
A rhyme or two for me.

"I've seen you sit and smoke and spit
With expletives profane,
Then tear with rage the virgin page
I tendered you in vain.
I've watched you glare in dull despair
Through hours of brooding thought,
Then with a shout bang gaily out
The 'word unique' you sought.

"I've heard you groan and grunt and moan
That rhyme's a wretched fetter;
That after all you're just a small
Fat-headed verse-begetter;
You'd balance me upon your knee
Like any lady friend,
Then with a sigh you'd lay me by
For weeks and weeks on end.

"I've known when you were mighty blue
And hammered me till dawn,
Dire poverty! But I would be
The last thing you would pawn.
Days debt-accurst! Then at its worst
The sky, behold, would clear;
A poem sold, the garret cold
Would leap to light and cheer.

"You've toted me by shore and sea
From Mexico to Maine;
From Old Cathay to Mandalay,
From Samarkand to Spain.
You've thumped me in the battle's din
And pounded me in peace;
By air and land you've lugged me and
Your shabby old valise.

"But now my keys no more with ease
To your two fingers yield;
With years of use my joints are loose,
With wear of flood and field.
And even you are slipping too:
You're puffy, stiff and grey:
Old Sport, we're done, our race is run -
Why not call it a day?"

Why not? You've been, poor old machine!
My tried and faithful friend.
With fingertip your keys I'll flip
Serenely to the end.
For even though you're stiff and slow,
No other will I buy.
And though each word be wan and blurred
I'll tap you till I die.

[Ed Shacklee]

Television

Hug me, mother of noise,
Find me a hiding place.
I am afraid of my voice.
I do not like my face.

xxx- Anne Stevenson

[Tim Love]

The title of the thread comes from the last line of a poem by Joseph Harrison

I read that the phrase came from John Updike.

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.

It's rather odd. Even yearly anthologies can be lacking. Trying to be timeless, to write for posterity, is understandable, but not at the expense of insulating oneself from the present and things that we all share. I'm surprised how few cell-phones appear in poems, given that people use them hours a day. Here's my haiku contribution

"Lonely Hearts"

Seeking Formalist.
Must be SA, must have used
iPad in a sonnet.

[Andrew Frisardi]

Apropos the topic of this thread, I've been remembering a passage from an essay I wrote on Edwin Muir, published in the Hudson Review several years ago.

I still agree with what Muir says, although I don't believe this means that the terminology of technological innovations can't fit into poetry somehow. I don't think Muir would either:

Muir was consistent in his romantic contempt for the modern idea of progress; he warned that, in a culture overdetermined by technological development, outward changes happen so fast that our primal identity becomes “indistinct. . . . The imagination cannot pierce to it as easily as it once could.” The constant metamorphosis of outer life brought about by technology obscures the essentials of human experience, which are remarkably consistent over time. In an essay called “The Poetic Imagination,” published in Essays on Literature and Society (1949), Muir made a distinction between technological and human progress:

Applied science shows us a world of consistent, mechanical progress. Machines give birth to ever new generations of machines, and the new machines are always better and more efficient than the old, and begin where the old left off. . . . But in the world of human beings all is different. . . . Every human being has to begin at the beginning, as his forebears did, with the same difficulties and pleasures, the same temptations, the same problem of good and evil, the same inclination to ask what life means.

For me, that bit about essential human identity becoming "indistinct" in the constant flux of technological change is key.

[Maryann Corbett]

It's terrible to have only the vaguest memory of a poem that might be pertinent here. Mary Jo Salter has a book entitled A Phone Call to the Future, and I think it's the title poem of that volume I'm remembering. As I recall it, the poem dredges up memories of old technologies (like the rotary phone) that have become so obsolete they've slipped from daily consciousness. She makes use, I think, of the surprise of recalling them and of the reader's recognition of how much has changed in such a circumscribed set of habits.

Does anybody have that poem, or a link to it?

[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.)