Poets Inspired by Technology? 52
dejetal asks: "Does anyone know of a poet who's typical topic is some form of technology? I have been personally interested in this subject for some time now (with disappointing search results), but now I have some new motivation: I will be attending Columbia University fairly soon, and I would like to have an interesting topic to work on for a writing/composition course. Columbia also has some exciting new majors that may appeal to the Slashdot crowd, one of them being Digital Media Technology , the area of study that I wish to enter. Can anybody point me towards some good techno-poets?"
Mostly anti-tech (Score:5, Informative)
Paul Durcan's "Christmas Day" (not online) has a comment that could be Slashdot's motto:
Pope Leo XIII wrote a Latin piece on photography in 1867: [translation] [gavinbryars.com]
Some gleanings from my weblog: landing-gear crisis [poems.com], Chuck-E-Cheese [poems.com], auto repair [poems.com]
Luis de Camoes (Score:5, Informative)
"Os Lusiadas" is mandatory reading in many high schools in Brazil and Portugal. Some links:
http://web.rccn.net/Camoes/ [rccn.net]
http://lusiadas.gertrudes.com/ [gertrudes.com]
Share & Enjoy ! (Score:2, Informative)
At times of special celebration a choir of over two million robots sing the company song "Share and Enjoy". Unfortunately another of the computing errors for which the company is justly famous means that the robot's voices are exactly a flattened fifth out of tune...
Share and Enjoy
Share and Enjoy
Journey through life
With a plastic boy
Or girl by your side
Let your pal be your guide
And when it breaks down
Or starts to annoy
Or grinds when it moves
And gives you no joy
Cos it's eaten your hat
Or had sex with your cat
Bled oil on the floor
or ripped off your door
You get to the point
You can't stand it anymore
Bring it to us
We won't give a fig
We'll tell you...
Go Stick Your Head In A Pig
Lawrence Lerner, RACTER, Momus (Score:5, Informative)
Anyway, a few pointers:
You'll probably have trouble finding them, but Lawrence Lerner wrote two books of computer-inspired poems. The first was "A.R.T.H.U.R.: The Life and Opinions of a Digital Computer". UMass Press, ISBN 0-87023-181-2.
ARTHUR is a dim-witted AI (the poems were written in the early 70s). The poems are humorous, but at the same time some of them are quite chilling. I forget the title of his second ARTHUR book; I never managed to track down a copy.
The other obvious answer is "The Policeman's Beard Is Half Constructed" by RACTER, aka William Chamberlain and Thomas Etter. RACTER was the psychotic cousin of ELIZA, and Chamberlain and Etter used it to create programs which would output demented prose and poetry.
Something I've often pondered is the feasibility of building a reverse-engineered INRAC clone under the GPL, so RACTER could live again. (Apparently the original authors lost the BASIC source code some years ago.)
If you include song lyrics as poetry, you have to check out recent albums by Momus [demon.co.uk]. He's the only songwriter I'm aware of dealing with technological subjects in an intelligent and witty fashion. "Virtual Valerie" (from "The Philosophy of Momus") is the best song I've ever heard about long-distance relationships via Internet, and "Finnegan The Folk Hero" is a hilarious pastiche of country music that'll strike a nerve with any web developer.
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Going back to Victorian times (Score:2, Informative)