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?"
Haiku (Score:2, Funny)
Everybody see me rule
Even on-topic
poetry as a game. (Score:2)
anyway, here are a few of the dumber ones, for some reason a lot of them have animals doing stuff as their themes...
There was a snake named Luan
That jumped in a pool not a pond
She said with a lisp, "oh I can't drink thissss!"
and laughed as she slithered along
The end
There twice was a frog named Samantha
Who married a strong young grey Panther
He said to her nightly, "I would hold you tightly"
But my paws would quell your sweet banter
The end
Three boats in a dock near the harbor
All waiting to go travel farther
The first captain said, "You two, go ahead"
But the two, being led
by courtesey said,
"Grab hold of wind and we'll follow!"
The end
Now that I read them again, they're not really perfect limmricks, but oh well...
perl poets (Score:4, Interesting)
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]
Re:Mostly anti-tech (Score:3, Insightful)
There are numberous odes to the bridge of Brooklyn: Mayakovsky and Lorca come to mind.
Linux Haikus (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Linux Haikus (Score:2)
Some Haikus (Score:1, Funny)
The Tao that is seen; Is not the true Tao, until You bring fresh toner.
Three things are certain: Death, taxes, and lost data. Guess which has occurred.
Windows NT crashed. I am the Blue Screen of Death. No one hears your screams.
Seeing my great fault Through darkening blue windows I begin again.
The code was willing, It considered your request, But the chips were weak.
Printer not ready. Could be a fatal error. Have a pen handy?
A file that big? It might be very useful. But now it is gone.
Errors have occurred. We won't tell you where or why. Lazy programmers.
Server's poor response Not quick enough for browser. Timed out, plum blossom.
Chaos reigns within. Reflect, repent, and reboot. Order shall return.
Login incorrect. Only perfect spellers may enter this system.
This site has been moved. We'd tell you where, but then we'd have to delete you.
Wind catches lily scatt'ring petals to the wind: segmentation fault
ABORTED effort: Close all that you have. You ask way too much.
First snow, then silence. This thousand dollar screen dies so beautifully.
With searching comes loss and the presence of absence: "My Novel" not found.
The Web site you seek cannot be located but endless others exist
Stay the patient course Of little worth is your ire The network is down
A crash reduces your expensive computer to a simple stone.
There is a chasm of carbon and silicon
the software can't bridge
Yesterday it worked Today it is not working Windows is like that.
To have no errors Would be life without meaning No struggle, no joy
You step in the stream, but the water has moved on. This page is not here.
Hal, open the file Hal, open the damn file, Hal open the, please Hal
Out of memory. We wish to hold the whole sky, But we never will.
Having been erased, The document you're seeking Must now be retyped.
The ten thousand things How long do any persist? Netscape, too, has gone.
Rather than a beep Or a rude error message, These words: "File not found."
Serious error. All shortcuts have disappeared Screen. Mind. Both are blank.
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
Roses are red... (Score:1)
If I keep going..
I'll get mod'ed down too..
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.
Re:Lawrence Lerner, RACTER, Momus (Score:2)
Racter FAQ: "The Policeman's Beard" Was Largely Prefab! [robotwisdom.com]
Re:Lawrence Lerner, RACTER, Momus (Score:1)
There's a group named Turing Machine [amazon.com]... I can't say for sure it's relevant, I only know one song and it's lyricless, but maybe their other songs have lyrics... damnit, Amazon, why have you engulfed CDNOW?
Re:Lawrence Lerner, RACTER, Momus (Score:1)
By the way, the second book looks like it's called "A.R.T.H.U.R. and M.A.R.T.H.A.: Or the Loves of a Computer". Or, at least that's what Amazon tells me it is..
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/043
Science Fiction Poetry (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:2, Interesting)
- The Railway Bridge of the Silvery Tay [mcgonagall-online.org.uk]
- The Tay Bridge Disaster [mcgonagall-online.org.uk]
- An Address to the New Tay Bridge [mcgonagall-online.org.uk]
Enjoy.[*]Poetry, alas, not being one of them.
Re:Going back to Victorian times (Score:2, Informative)
From Locksley Hall (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:From Locksley Hall (Score:2)
I think that poetry inspired by technology per se would be a bad idea.
I think that's prejudicial.
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.
I believe it is in pursuit of this value and in neglect of others that contemporary poetry finds itself so lost to its audience, as another poster observes. The ineffable everyday object is burdened with all the aspirations of the poet.
Nothing is more succint and accurate an explanation of a technology per se than that technology itself.
That is interesting. There is, then, a poetry of the machine. Aesthetic value in the efficient expression of power, in its simplicity.
Howver, relating the human experience to technology is a different matter. Technological change is, itself, a new constant in human experience.
And this matter is not contingent upon change as a new constant. This is the fertile ground for technology within the poem: not as its focus but as its ground. The poetry of the junkyard, of the tramway, of the computer exists, but as notes within a melody more internal.
Re:From Locksley Hall (Score:2)
I believe it is in pursuit of this value and in neglect of others that contemporary poetry finds itself so lost to its audience, as another poster observes. The ineffable everyday object is burdened with all the aspirations of the poet.
What I am talking about is economy, not necessarily obscurity. Not every poem has to be The Wasteland. Not every poem has to be hard to approach, but it does need to reward effort that goes beyond the superficial.
You can't dismiss "contemporary poetry" in a broad sweep. The failure of poetry to capture a broad contemporary audience can't be laid to a single stylistic trend. If there was somebody who could capture the public's imagination the way Homer, or even Kipling did, then it would have been done by now. There are external reasons why poetry has declined in popularity. Among them:the availability and quality of artificial light. The natural change of pace and mood that the waning of the day brought to every generation of humanity before the twentieth century is gone. With it went a whole oral tradition of legend, storytelling, and poetry. Poetry is now a largely literary activity.
Another is the availability of mass entertainment and media. In the nineteenth century, an illterate person might still have memorized a body of popular poetry, political doggerel, and popular drinking songs. Now, they are intimately familiar with the latest episode of "Friends".
And yet another is that the pace and volume of information that a person deals with are much greater. This has driven a dual tendency in communication style towards terseness (good in my opinion) and vagueness (bad). Good poetry is never actually vague (in my opinion), but it at times may be dense or even self-contradictory.
That is interesting. There is, then, a poetry of the machine. Aesthetic value in the efficient expression of power, in its simplicity.
You must see that underlying this observation is a metaphor. The essence of this metaphor is this: we carry over this sense of the minimal sufficiency of a poem as a description of itself to some other thing that defies compact literal description. If somebody's dancing is poetry in motion, it means that a detailed breakdown of its components of it will fail to capture its net essence. You might say that the intricate lacework of girders and cables of a mighty bridge are "poetry in steel" -- this means that no literal description can have the same impact on the imagination as the thing itself. No literal description could capture the majesty of a truly great engineering work. But poetry actually could capture part of the human reaction to the drama of a great bridge.
>I think that poetry inspired by technology per se would be a bad idea.
I think that's prejudicial.
Perhaps my position could be clarified in this way: I think technology and poetry exist in different realms of human endeavor, according to their own values of aesthetics and craft. If there is a place to look for poetry "inspired by" technology, it will be in the interface between their realms: between engineering form and norms of efficiency and function on one hand, and the subjective realm of sensuality, perception, and sympathy on the other.
Re:From Locksley Hall (Score:2)
I haven't run across this idea before-- is it original?
Re:From Locksley Hall (Score:2)
I wish it were; I've heard this from a few folklorists, and found it compelling. How many of us have sat around a campfire and told stories? How many of us have tried our hand at storytelling in any other situation?
Cultural anthropologists have just begun to ask how patterns of sleep differ in cultures that don't have artificial light and where clocks are scarce. One finding is that the people often go to bed shortly after dark and wake up near
Gibson's Agrippa (Score:2)
I think... (Score:3, Funny)
A lovely poem about PIII's
sorry, couldn't resist
http://archive.salon.com/21st/chal/1998/02/10ch
poetry BY a computer (Score:2)
Re:poetry BY a computer (Score:1)
Haiku machine [tranglos.com]
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)
Alan Sondheim (Score:2)
Alan Sondheim is the author of a lengthy meditation on the poetry and philosophy of cyberspace, The Internet Text [anu.edu.au], amongst (many) other things. He has used shell scripts and other techniques to generate texts. He writes about sex, death, the body, desire, trauma, capital, terror, etc.; technology and its implications remain an important theme throughout.
buffalo poetics (Score:1)
http://epc.buffalo.edu/poetics/
(the buffalo poetics list is interesting)
or alan sondheim
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=I
or Trace
http://trace.ntu.ac.uk
Albert Goldbarth (Score:2, Interesting)
poetry of programming (Score:1)
Totalitarian regimes produce lots of it (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Totalitarian regimes produce lots of it (Score:1)
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.
Given my lack of mod points I'll second this. I wouldn't even bother with the tact in this case either. If a poem is good then it is because it is to do with people in some way, whatever else it may reference.
What he said. (Score:2)
The only technology-inspired poetic literature I can think of that isn't primarily totalitarian propaganda is a "novel"--which it's not; it's a book of poetry--by Mark Leyner called My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist.
But, like hatless said, since it's Serious Literature, it's about people, not technology (one theme is tech-overkill's potential personality-disintegrating effects).
Also, it's maybe the oddest, and probably the funniest, book ever.
Not just for dictatorships... (Score:2)
Marinetti (Score:2)
Homer? (Score:2)
Or, do you mean the hideously limited view of "technology" that only applies to something with a keyboard?
grr (Score:2)
Shameless chest-beating (Score:1)
in Norway in -96 called "The Cement Garden" using aggressively contemporary imagery
and quite a bit of "sci-fi-y" stuff too.
Problem is the sci-fi-y stuff is pretty much untranslatable due to the quite
complicated verse.
Anyway I'll just throw out two of the "contemporary" ones to show that one can
make poetry that is not about an English 18 century meadow but set in modern technological
life, and is NOT a limerick or light verse.
The Wild Side
Lou Reed in Brooklyn, 1978;
Sniffing powder-dope and talking piss
on CD-tracks that fix the date
of unrenocicating "Fuck all this!"
A microscopic hieroglyph maybe -
a plastic-haiku lit by laser-light,
illumined sparks of noise we cannot see,
but still comes through the speakers all too bright.
The rancid words are just a show,
a twisted exclamation mark -
the boy onstage who reads them knows
he still is frightened of the dark,
and blinks in spots of white-hot speed
and pulls the same joke as Lou Reed.
Remote Control
Remote-control will guide me through
the channels of pale electric blue,
through frequencies forever stuck
in all encompassing, final "Fuck!"
and heroes never draws as fast
as remote-control that flicks me past.
Real and fictitious pieces of life
(much like the words in this poem I write),
to outweigh all the deaths you've seen
in the radiance of the TV-screen,
stubborn advertisement-flicks
divided by a simple click,
and where your face's forever free
from pixel-old-age on TV.
But the heavy bomber that slowly soars
in a movie (from who knows what war),
reminds me of the deepest fear:
There's no control, remote or near.
Abort, Retry, Ignore? (Score:2)
The great granddaddy of them all (Score:2)
Almost as good: USian Pie [slashdot.org]
Ah, the good old days of Musical Trolls.
Christopher Dewdney (Score:1)
Read about him a bit more here:
http://www.vex.net/rikscafe/dewdney/Overvi
Life in Binary (Score:1)
Life in Binary [slashdot.org].
Enjoy
Plenty of technology songs (Score:2)
Here are some links to technology themed filksongs:
Steve Savitzky's computer songs [thestarport.org]. My favorite is The World Inside the Crystal [thestarport.org].
There are other technologies besides computers though. Here are some songs about space exploration [mp3s.com] available as MP3s.
Here is a list of links to science and technology filk songs [dnaco.net].
How will this mod...? (Score:2)
Richard Kenney (Score:1)
Descent
he said. O, luck! like Alice through the bisqueware
chip, we've crossed our glass. What man in nineteen forty-
two could have predicted that queer antecendent
to the gunsight? Microchip: the square
projection of the crystal ball -- imagi
Holub (Score:1)