[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.)

[Gregory Dowling]

Maryann, cross-posted with you. Of course, what a pertinent example. Here are the opening lines:


A PHONE CALL TO THE FUTURE
Mary Jo Salter

Who says science fiction
is only set in the future?
After a while, the story that looks least
believable is the past.
The console television with three channels.
Black-and-white picture. Manual controls:
the dial clicks when you turn it, like the oven.
You have to get up and walk somewhere to change things.
You have to leave the house to mail a letter.


And it ends (so pertinently for this thread):


That's what I mean. We were Martians. Nothing's stranger
than our patience, our humanity, inhumanity.
Our worrying about robots. Earplug cell phones
that make us seem to be walking about like loonies
talking to ourselves. Perhaps we are.

All of it was so quaint. And I was there.
Poetry was there; we tried to write it.

[Roger Slater]

There was a Spectator competition that overlaps with this topic, for what it's worth. Here are some of the entries folks around here were working on:

http://www.ablemuse.com/erato/showth...highlight=2613

[Gregory Dowling]

Thanks, Roger. I see I even intervened on the thread, so I should have remembered it myself.

[Andrew Frisardi]

I'll have to get a copy of that Williamson collection, Gregory. I can see that a poem like the sonnet of his you posted in this thread could have quite a different feel in context.

Well, as I was tossing and turning unable to sleep last night, I thought of another contemporary poet who has worked with the language that's the subject of this thread: Richard Burns, the British poet I reviewed for Semicerchio (a mag. that Gregory edits for, folks). His collection The Manager (2001) is a book-length dramatic monologue in the voice of an executive who works for a multinational corporation. Burns uses the fiction in part to explore current idioms and jargon, as well as various dissociated mental states that go along with contemporary life. I liked this book a lot. I'll type some in below to give a flavor of the whole. Burns (also known as Richard Berengarten, by the way) calls the form he uses here "verse paragraphs." One of the things that strikes me about Burns's way of doing it is that the form allows him to go all over the place, free associate, disassociate. Also, the dramatic monologue framework gives the material (at least, in the course of the whole book) pathos.

Boarded the Twin Com and the look on her face said Heaven. Strapped her up front next to me and gave her a pair of phones. Everything A OK. We're cleared to taxi OK.

Wind at ground level 15 knots. Around zero three zero and gusting a bit. Visibility OK. Three knots at three and a half thou. But I go through the checks and would you bloody believe it

There's a drop of over 200 on the port mag. Completely out of parameters and I'm not taking chances with her aboard. So back we go to the shed . . .

VFR and once we're past the Needles it's Cavoc all the way. Look there's our shadow on the foam-flecked waves. Like a day in early June and I ease her into auto. At Ortac 50º North we join

The Mile High club . . .

and:

There go the dead again. Wailing. Constantly I hear them. Even when not listening. Even this side the partition wall.

Giggling in the office during coffee break. Conversing on the tube at the other end of the carriage. Beneath your voice on the phone.

In a meths drinker's snore from a bench on Platform 8. Whispering through the stadium under the crowd's roar. Crackling through gaps.

In The Ultimate in CD Hi-Fi Integration.Despite metal particle coating lasers and microchips. Like a horde of Hollywood extras

In a multi-million epic . . .

and (this last one using the form and typeface of a fax):

Sir Keith Lawdon Dubai

From: Rex Harmer <rex.harmer@prospect.com>
To: Sir Keith Lawdon
Dubai<fassbinder.suite@galaxyhotel.com>
Sent: 1 March 2001 09:34
Attach: brunofax.doc
Subject: Bananas

Hello Keith,

Sorry to trouble you with this but to judge by his fax (see attachment) Bruno appears to have gone bananas. Will try to contain problem but may need to consult you for directions. Can you send contingency instructions.

Thanks. Rex.

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[Tim Love]

As Janice points out, the real risk is of seeming dated.

Yes, though people still write historical novels. I don't know why poets might avoid mentioning tech more than novelists do. Some tech merely offers new ways to do old things (FAX replacing pony-express) but others affect big issues. Medical developments affect childlessness, our notions of death (borderline cases increase), our notions of identity (transplants, brain-changing drugs and surgery, sex changing). Cell phones and video phones let us more easily be alone without being lonely. Space and Time aren't what they used to be.

Note also that the UK has Informationist Poetry

I haven't yet managed to track it down to Updike

I can't recall where I read that - The Dark Horse? The source may well remain unknown. Updike's an unlikely inventor, I'd say.

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.

Perhaps the more interesting effects are deeper, more radical, than content - Flarf, HyperText poems, etc.

[Ed Shacklee]

Originally Posted by Tim Love

Perhaps the more interesting effects are deeper, more radical, than content - Flarf, HyperText poems, etc.

I've wondered how much poetry has been affected by setting -- if haiku or villanelles, for example, came about in part because they had an elegant look on paper of the size and style used back then. HyperText poems may enjoy only a brief time on the cutting edge as technology changes and improves.

[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!