[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.

[Janice D. Soderling]

I have read the above Mike Stocks poem somewhere and I really, really loved it. Thanks Maryann for posting this.

[Maryann Corbett]

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'.

I've got Auden's collected out of the library just now, and I'm looking at 'Night Mail.' It seems remarkably untechnological--so much so that I have to figure out what sort of conveyance is carrying the mail. The picture of a train appears gradually:

I.

This is the night mail crossing the Border,
Bringing the cheque and the postal order,

Letters for the rich, letters for the poor,
The shop at the corner, the girl next door.

Pulling up Beattock, a steady climb:
The gradient's against her, but she's on time.

Past cotton-grass and moorland boulder,
Shovelling white steam over her shoulder,

Snorting noisily, she passes
Silent miles of wind-bent grasses.

Birds turn their heads as she approaches,
Stare from bushes at her blank-faced coaches.

Sheep-dogs cannot turn her course;
They slumber on with paws across.

In the farm she passes no one wakes,
But a jug in the bedroom gently shakes.

[Gregory Dowling]

Originally Posted by 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?

John, I've just checked in the Ricks edition of Tennyson and there is this note: "T. comments: 'When I went by the first train from Liverpool to Manchester (1830) I thought that the wheels ran in a groove. It was a black night, and there was such a vast crowd round the train at the station that we could not see the wheels. Then I made this line.' "

What you say about the image, of course, is true, and that's what makes it memorable. But it is slightly a pity that it isn't technically correct, since Tennyson's speaker is here supposed to be coming back to the idea of living in the present day with its steamships and railways (specifically mentioned) rather than escaping to "summer isles of Eden lying in dark-purple spheres of sea".

Thanks, Maryann, for the Mike Stocks sonnet. That was one of the poems I was referring to but couldn't remember who wrote it.

Interesting the references to Auden here. I guess he was vaguely associated with the so-called "Pylon poets" I mentioned at the start of this thread but actually his early poems are more memorable for their pictures of deserted, derelict industries than for celebrations of the machine. Here is a section from an early poem which ties in very neatly with the Tennyson, since he is using the same stanza form as "Locksley Hall":

Get there if you can and see the land you once were proud to own
Though the roads have almost vanished and the expresses never run:

Smokeless chimneys, damaged bridges, rotting wharves and choked canals,
Tramlines buckled, smashed trucks lying on their side across the rails;

Power-stations locked, deserted, since they drew the boiler fires;
Pylons fallen or subsiding, trailing dead high-tension wires;

Head-gears gaunt on grass-grown pit-banks, seams abandoned years ago;
Drop a stone and listen for its splash in flooded dark below.

[Andrew Frisardi]

Gregory, your comment about Auden’s technological imagery not really being a “celebration of the machine” made me wonder what in English or American poetry would have been comparable to Italian Futurists--aside from their Fascist politics, that is.

Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto was mentioned in the papers a lot last year, its 100th anniversary. I have a friend in the area, a 90-year-old widow of a second-generation Futurist painter, Mino della Site, who did painting after painting of airplanes. The things still sell a lot.

I guess that writing about high tech now would be comparable to writing about machinery then. Only no doubt the rate of change is faster with electronic and digital innovations.

[John Whitworth]

Spender wrote a poem about pylons. He says they are 'like nude giant girls that have no secret'. Well, he always was a bloody fool, wasn't he? He also wrote one called 'The Express' which makes you think he had never been on a train.

[Jerome Betts]

John, it was 'bare like giant nude girls that have no secret' rather than 'nude giant girls'.

The giant nude girls have birds' nests in their hair sometimes, and in Spain whopping great stork nurseries. Curious

[Jerome Betts]

Many apologies, John. Robin Skelton's Poetry of the Thirties (1964) has come my way, and there the line is 'Bare like nude, giant girls that have no secret'.

Never trust the web, where it was quoted as 'giant nude girls', unless Spender revised the original at some point between 1933 and 1964.