April 10, 2000
Poetry and Technology
Tidbit Archive
| The irony of technology is bittersweet,
A cycle oft to repeat, Marconi's marvel now obsolete. -- W. J. Mallory April is National Poetry Month in the U.S. and this week's tidbit is devoted to exploring the connections between poetry and technology. It turns out there are many. Technology is the subject of much poetry. Technological change, faith in technology, the future, old technologies, even Y2K are the subjects of poems. Technology, especially the web -- but even such an offbeat technology as the gumball machine (see photo above) -- is being used to disseminate poetry. Technologies such as hypertext are being used to create and explore new forms of poetry. And, of course, there are "poetry machines," both real and fanciful. The links below will take you to some unexpected places. Enjoy. And the moving keyboard types, and having typed moves on.1 |
Links:
The Academy of American Poets: National Poetry Month 2000Martin Auer: "The Poetry Machine" -- an English version Auer's original German "Lyrikmaschine."
Poetry by W. J. Mallory, including, "Old Technology, "Abacus Revisited," and "Y2K" (my personal favorite).
Gumball Poetry -- a literary magazine that publishes poems in capsules and places them in gumball machines, one of which is pictured at the top of this page.
"Destiny uncovered when we double click": Poems about Technology -- an essay by Terri Kimiko Oda with links to poems about technological change, faith in technology, and other subjects.
Poetry, Technology, and the Cityscape: a hypertextualized reading of Mark Doty's poem "Broadway."
"Toward a Literature Moving Outside Itself: The Beginnings of Hypermedia Poetry," a "proto-anthology" by Christopher Funkhouser.
"The Wacky Poetry Machine." Remember "Mad-Libs"? This electronic version makes silly poems (for kids).
Kulturezone -- a Norwegian site (in English) devoted to technoculture, including links to information about computer generated writing.
"The Clockwork Poetry Machine" -- a poem about technology by Keith Bennett.
"Great Moments in Literature No. 9" -- from Jacket, an Australian literary magazine. Includes a wonderful photo of "inventor Hiram Bamburger at the keyboard of his 'Linopentametron', a modified Linotype typesetting machine he converted to produce anapæstic pentameter by the yard, automatically, according to a phonetic scheme of his own devising. " Uh-huh.
1The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, verse 51 (with apologies).
