Tech Talk

All the vivid tech und theory talk blooming on the blogs prompted me to post these comments I’d left on K. Lorraine Graham and Johannes Göransson’s sites. If there’s any theory they're inching toward, it might be that technology makes visible changes in our social reality—in the kinds of labor we’re doing, and the characteristic shapes of our encounters with one another—which, in turn, make themselves felt as shifts in our time sense. A poem is in one of its aspects a representation of time, both visual and aural, so has a way of finding the pith of the now more quickly and cheaply than, say, software upgrades or new CGI.

The way parts of speech connect in a sentence has been seen as analogous to the way persons are connected within a society. What about the speed at which those connections within the poem happen, and the patterns of repetition—the meter—within that speed? Can that be socially meaningful, too? And does a poem have to be socially meaningful—does its “meter” have to have the pace of lived experience right—before it can be politically meaningful?

Lorraine had posted about her work life leaving her tired in a way that “changes how I experience new work.”

Hi Lorraine,

I've been thinking along these lines, too. For me, it's been more a form of wondering how the sheer quantity of blogs, and the speed-reading (and writing) they encourage, extend the day job rhythm you describe into private life. I like Galatea Resurrects, and Ron's big links pulls, but there's too much of both I think, all pulled together too fast, to encourage much quality thinking or responding.

Since I've lost the wind on my own blog lately, I was looking back at some old posts and came across one on "Numbers Trouble." That seems a decade ago in blog time, but I was shocked to see it was only Feb.'08. For those of us who ride the blogs regular, since then there's been a large round table on the Gurlesque, Orono, Flarf vs. Conceptual Poetry, announcements for the launch of precisely 234.6 books and chapbooks I'd like to read, and Heath Ledger as The Joker.

I keep imagining there's some place I'm not privy to where people keep in touch with poetry in some other way, discuss poems in paper journals that appeared more than a year ago, savor and carefully respond to something as serious as Numbers Trouble. Or that the future will sort it all out: some scholar will write on the "Numbers Trouble" debate deep in the next century and it will shine with its proper significance. But in my neck of the woods, everything's feeling a little these days like noise. Corporate fighting-for-mindshare day-job-like noise.

I'm with you in thinking there's no no easy solution to this problem, until something in our neoliberal work life changes. That won't happen I think until they (we?) stop spinning downturns, in every sense of the word, as disasters.

Johannes noted his recent habit of reading poets mostly 40 or under. “When did this happen? When did I start to ignore my elders?”

Hi Johannes,

I’m sure the neglect of the elders is a regular stage-of-life thing, but I’ve been thinking lately too how quickly the blogs and la vie Internet are shifting our time-sense, so that poets who came of age even as late as the ‘90s feel quaint and slightly antiquated to me already. Looking back to the elders may be coming to feel like looking back six months on a blog roll—who needs yesterday’s papers?

If I’m right, I should say I’m value-neutral about the change—it’s just a change, not a decline, and a fact either way whether I like it or not—but that’s not entirely true. The way poetry’s normally preserved and transmitted is through a sort of informal underground protection of the elders—a minyan of the freakishly committed—that shelters them until the university finds them. Is that still happening as our attentions stretch out more horizontally online? Probably I guess, it’s just no easier to see than it was before, despite the Internet’s promise that you just might be able to see just about everything.

The poetries I find most interesting these days are the ones that try to tackle that new time-sense on the level of meter or ‘tude, but the big challenge I think is won’t that look like yesterday’s papers soon, too? Or is all “Tradition” yesterday’s papers yellowed until they become desirable as antiques, projecting the sexy aura of the archive?