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?"

Comments

Haiku

[cyberkreiger]

First post on slashdot
Everybody see me rule
Even on-topic

perl poets

[neillewis]

There is a thriving perl poetry community.

Mostly anti-tech

[RobotWisdom]

I can't really imagine a serious poem about tech unless it's anti-tech. For light verse, John Updike no doubt has some things, and there's Nabokov's "The Refrigerator Awakes" [RealAudio]. (In the realm of song lyrics, They Might Be Giants is another likely source.)

Paul Durcan's "Christmas Day" (not online) has a comment that could be Slashdot's motto:

Why do computer programmers always answer
When asked in questionnaires
In Sunday newspapers
What is your idea of Heaven? -
Snorkelling in Acapulco.

Pope Leo XIII wrote a Latin piece on photography in 1867: [translation]

O miracle of human thought,
O art with newest marvels fraught...

Some gleanings from my weblog: landing-gear crisis, Chuck-E-Cheese, auto repair

Re:Mostly anti-tech

[rodentia]

I beg to differ. Anti-tech is too strong. Much of modern poetry may regard the machine with ambivalence, but to the extent it features in a poem it partakes of the struggle for relevance with every other external.

There are numberous odes to the bridge of Brooklyn: Mayakovsky and Lorca come to mind.

Luis de Camoes

[SAN1701]

Considered the great portuguese poet ever, his most important work, "Os Lusiadas", is a story about the Portuguese explorations of the seas since 1400, and their achivements (like, discovering the route to India, "discovering" Madagascar, etc.). Since they were dealing with the highest technology of their time, I think it qualifies as an important poem inspired by technology.

"Os Lusiadas" is mandatory reading in many high schools in Brazil and Portugal. Some links:

http://web.rccn.net/Camoes/
http://lusiadas.gertrudes.com/

Share & Enjoy !

[espee]

"Share and Enjoy" is, of course, the company motto of the hugely successful Sirius Cybernetics Corporation Complaints division.

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

[metamatic]

I'm assuming you mean published "name brand" poets, rather than Anonymous Cowards... I suspect I'm gonna be the only person posting anything useful here, but it just so happens that you've touched on a favorite obsession of mine: why aren't there more poets dealing with actual modern life?

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. 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.

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 (also a collection) and Star*Line, 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
2. The Tay Bridge Disaster
3. An Address to the New Tay Bridge

Enjoy.

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

Re:Going back to Victorian times

[muzthe42nd]

oh yes, good old william mcgonagall, he's quite possibly the greatest poet ever, well, ok, that'sa teeny weeny lie. HE got a mention in the book "worst writers" or something, part of a series of books called the mind's eye or something. But seriously, he s really awful, hilariously awful

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.

I think...

[msouth]

...that you shall never see
A lovely poem about PIII's

sorry, couldn't resist

http://archive.salon.com/21st/chal/1998/02/10cha l2 .html

5 Volts

[Tal Cohen]

Here is 5 Volts, by Eran Tromer.

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.