[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?

[Gail White]

Seems like most of the poems that use high-tech references are light verse...Light Quareterlty probably has many in its pages. I wrote a ballade once with the refrain "So would you kindly put your cell phone down", which LQ printed.

Topical references are more of a problem. I used Brad Pitt once in a poem as an example of a great catch, but on the theory that I'd still be read in a hundred years, later substituted the words "a rich man."

[Andrew Frisardi]

dipshit comment deleted

[Julie Steiner]

Before I sent in my Nemerov Award entry in November 2009, I went back and forth on one line:
"Last night I saw my daughter's MySpace page,"
"Last night I saw my daughter's Facebook page,"

I went with MySpace. Dad nab it! I finally make the finalist pool, and my poem is outdated before it's even published!

[Janice D. Soderling]

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

This from post #1 reminds me of something Aldous Huxley wrote about his first visit to America. Can't remember the exact wording, but it was something to the effect that he initially thought all Americans were in the habit of talking to themselves, but he found out they were only chewing gum.

[Andrew Frisardi]

Gregory, in answer to your original question in this thread, "Where are the poems of Facebook," etc., another one I just remembered is by our own Maryann C., a fine poem called "MySpace Invader," that's in her chapbook Dissonance. I really like the closing lines, which themselves are a comment on this subject:

What strangeness will engulf our lives when they
smile out of every pixel, wild and golden?
I need to know what world I will be old in.

[Maryann Corbett]

Thanks, Andrew! If we hadn't disabled it, I'd feel a terrible temptation to use the Facebook-like "Like" function included in this board's software

The Iron Horse Literary Review was recently collecting submissions for a Facebook poems issue. I'll check when it will appear.

It dawns on me that I've used cell phones in at least two poems. Nemo Hill's "Um Portugues," which appeared in 14 by 14, focuses on a phone message machine.

Shortly after 9/11 there was a lot of prose about the last phone messages left by the dead. Does anyone recall pertinent poems?

[John Whitworth]

I'm going right back to the beginning of this thread. I had no idea that Tennyson's grooves referred to railways. Ha dhe never travelled by one? Hadn't they got as far as Lincolnshire. Having said that I think Tennyson's image works very well, worlds spinning in preordained grooves. change not up to us, it's all rather Darwinian, don't you think?
Auden as a boy was muich more interested in machines than in poetry, though I'm not sure how much that comes out - possibly in 'Night Mail'.

Of course the problem is that most of us poets dont know much about technology. I've only just learned how to send text messages.

[Maryann Corbett]

Everybody who gets e-mail endures spam--no technological expertise required! Going back to the beginning of the thread, I see that Gregory asks where the spam poems are. Here's one, by Mike Stocks, who judged our Sonnet Bakeoff back in 2006:

419

Dear Friend, have no suspiciousments or fear.
My name is Budwa Charles, attorney to
the President Kabila of Zaire,
assassinated in attempted coup.

My client (late) had trusted my good name
of (US) 50 million dollar stash.
No family is come forwarded to claim,
and now I must secure abroad the cash.

On you I have esteeming profile to
a triple ‘A’ of highest finance sense,
and would put half in best account you own,

and profit 12.5 per cent to you.
Please send, in speedy highest confidence,
the details of address and fax and phone.