Poets Inspired by Technology?

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?"

perl poets

[neillewis]

There is a thriving perl poetry [perlmonks.org] community.

Linux Haikus

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux Haikus [linuxhaiku.com]. Share thoughts and humor on linux using the ancient Japanese form of poetry known as haiku

Science Fiction Poetry

[eddy the lip]

The first that springs to mind is Ray Bradbury. He's published at least two volumes of poetry with wide ranging subject matter (rather like his fiction, for that mattter). It's not necessarily to everyone's taste in the same sense that his short stories may not be; that is, he's obviously having fun and they're extremely un-pretentious. I enjoyed them.

While I was googling for another name (which I unfortunately couldn't find), I discovered that both Ursula K. LeGuin and Thomas Disch have published poetry. Not sure how technology oriented any of it is. I think I'll be looking for some of it though, especially Disch.

Finally, you may want to check out the Rhysling Awards [dm.net] (also a collection [sfsite.com]) and Star*Line [dm.net], the newsletter of the Science Fiction Poetry Association.

Going back to Victorian times

[Doctor Hu]

Technology as a typical subject perhaps not, but the immortal William McGonagall did touch on that topic, as he did on many others[*].

1. The Railway Bridge of the Silvery Tay [mcgonagall-online.org.uk]
2. The Tay Bridge Disaster [mcgonagall-online.org.uk]
3. An Address to the New Tay Bridge [mcgonagall-online.org.uk]

Enjoy.

[*]Poetry, alas, not being one of them.

From Locksley Hall

[hey!]

Here is a snippet from Tennyson's Locksley Hall:

For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see,
Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be;

Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails,
Pilots of the purple twilight dropping down with costly bales;

Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain'd a ghastly dew
From the nations' airy navies grappling in the central blue;

Far along the world-wide whisper of the south-wind rushing warm,
With the standards of the peoples plunging thro' the thunder-storm;

Till the war-drum throbb'd no longer, and the battle-flags were furl'd
In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.

A better question than what poets are inspired by technology, is what makes inspiring poetry, and how does technology fit into that? Art at its best makes you look at the world differently, and, in some rare cases, as above, rises to prescience. Poetry, if it is of lasting value, addresses conditions that are themselves lasting. In this case, the constants of commerce and conflict interact with an imagined new technology of flight (naturally the details are somewhat wrong but in general he has the right picture). Of course, there is some wish fulfilment going on here too: aerial warfare will be in Tennyson's view so ghastly that we will finally put aside warfare altogether.

I think that poetry inspired by technology per se would be a bad idea. Partly it is the nature of poetry: a poem should be the most succint description of itself that is possible; if it can be condensed and rendered literal, then it isn't really a poem anymore. Nothing is more succint and accurate an explanation of a technology per se than that technology itself. Therefore technology is a poor choice as a source of poetic inspriation (not to mention the long term downside of becoming obsolete). Howver, relating the human experience to technology is a different matter. Technological change is, itself, a new constant in human experience.

Albert Goldbarth

[madisonriver]

I'm writing my thesis on physics in poetry, and I have to tell you you're probably out of luck finding a specific poet who writes mainly about technology. However, there are many poets out there who have written one or two poems about technology that are worth checking out. Check out a database like LitFinder (which I'm sure Columbia will have in their library system) and use the search option. Except for the exception: Albert Goldbarth writes awesome poems about physics, astronomy, geology . . . he's pretty well known, and loves science. I'd suggest his books "Heaven and Earth: A Cosmology", and "Marriage, and Other Science Fiction".

Totalitarian regimes produce lots of it

[hatless]

There are plenty of odes to technology from secular totalitarian states. Dig into poetry from the likes of the USSR, Communist China, North Korea, Nazi Germany and their satellite states for an endless supply of verse about rockets, hydroelectric dams, nuclear submarines, tractors and vaccination campaigns. Mao Zedong himself penned quite a few fetching works about rural electrification and massive irrigation projects in his day.

It's not just for dictatorships, of course. No country that prides itself on its technological superiority over its neighbors can do without at least a few state-sanctioned sonnets about whatever it is the country produces. Major empires of any kind tend to produce plenty of it during their big expansionist periods. Go back to the 19th Century and you'll find plenty of American poems about the building of railroads, telegraph lines and steamships, for instance.

Poems about technology tend not to hold up very well over time. A poem about a gigantic concrete dam isn't quite so resonant 30 years later when a dam twice as big is built a couple hundred miles upriver and the first dam is covered in scaffolding for 10 years at a time for repairs to some of that concrete and one of the turbines. A poem about an emotional moment in your life conjured up by seeing the dam covered in that scaffolding has a better chance of holding up. People tend to be more interesting than technology in the long run, and the good poems with, uh, technology in them tend not to be about technology at all.