Hemingway Never Did This
I read that he lost a suitcase full of manuscripts on a
train and that they never were recovered.
I can't match the agony of this
but the other night I wrote a 3-page poem
upon this computer
and through my lack of diligence and
practice
and by playing around with commands
on the menu
I somehow managed to erase the poem
forever.
believe me, such a thing is difficult to do
even for a novice
but I somehow managed to do
it.
now I don't think this 3-pager was immortal
but there were some crazy wild lines,
now gone forever.
it bothers more than a touch, it's some-
thing like knocking over a good bottle of
wine.
and writing about it hardly makes a good
poem.
still, I thought somehow you'd like to
know?
if not, at least you've read this far
and there could be better work
down the line.
let's hope so, for your sake
and
mine.
Commentary
Let’s not quibble with Buk, and tell him about unerase commands, ok? The point is, the matter of fact use of the computer in a poem.
I’ve been interested for years now in poems that incorporate the computer. Contemporary poets don’t usually condemn the machine, as liberal arts people did when I was a student. Machines have stopped being Blake’s “dark, Satanic mills” and are accepted as part of the landscape. Once in a while, even, machines are accepted too enthusiastically.
There was another I recall, can’t remember the poet, but it went something like “Green be thy screen!” It was the poet’s gratitude for the convenience of the computer for her in writing poems. Again, as Martin observed, some of these poems quickly date. I’m old enough that green screens are strongly in my memory, but I daresay many readers today have never seen a monochrome monitor.
There is Brautigan’s “Machines of Amazing Grace.” I didn’t cotton to his poem because for me there is something chilling about benevolent machines watching over me. [I didn’t cotton to it either, mostly because it did nothing for me, and because I can only take Brautigan in very short poems - martin]
Still, there is a bunch of poems, enough I think to make an anthology.
— John K. Taber
Martin adds
The thing I noticed about today’s poem is that it is, in a sense, the mirror image of the Jonas piece [Poem #1418] that introduced the theme. Whereas Jonas treated computers as a metaphor, using them as a poetic device to illumine the age-old themes of love and loss, in Bukowski’s poem the computer is the subject of the work, a mundane fact of life that is in turn illumined by the poem’s metaphors. And, of course, an occurrence that most readers can empathise with :)
Incidentally, while I was googling Bukowski (with whom I was unfamiliar), I came across the following gem:
some people never go crazy.
what truly horrible lives
they must lead.
– Charles Bukowski
Apropos of nothing - I just wanted to share it.
— Martin
Links
Biography (a trifle clumsily written, but detailed, and with several links after it):
http://www.popsubculture.com/pop/bio_project/charles_bukowski.html
A nice Bukowski site:
http://home.swipnet.se/~w-15266/cultur/bukowski/
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From the Wondering Minstrels mailing list, 1999–2008.
Rory Day · 5 January 2004
I quite agree. And, expressing the frustrations and fears of all us word processor users…Bukowski!