Poetry in the Age of the iPhone

Guest blogger, Shelley Puhak

For most of last year, I was alarmed by all of the new research coming out on the malleability of our brains, warning the Web is dramatically altering our circuitry. Friends were subjected to my panicked rants about how my iPhone was shorting out my attention span. And so, in a bit of a rut, I forced myself back to what I had grown up with: college–ruled notebooks and Bic pens, sure that would shield me.

Yet weeks ago, stuck on the tarmac at Heathrow during a lightening storm, I started texting a poem to myself on that damn iPhone. And that particular draft worked, while many etched in ink collapsed. A coincidence, of course, but it started me thinking: in matters of composition, does the medium matter at all?

I am composing this message at night on a backlit screen in much the same way as my poems. I’ll wander in and out, checking my bank balance (payday!), messaging one friend (is chicken defrosted three days ago safe to eat?), emailing another (beach conditions?), skimming through news stories (what else is burning?). I’ll run upstairs to put my three-year-old back into his bed. And down to the basement to switch over a load of laundry.

And you are reading this on a screen, led here by your own internet skimming, joining up with me through a series of clicks. You bring your own distractions—barking dog, pop-up ads, a partner clanging pots and pans, spam announcing your lottery win.

So, we skim, we circle back, interrupt one another. Do you love me less because of this? Is my message more superficial than one sent by evening post from a solitary writer in smoking jacket, pacing his library?

*

My first book, Stalin in Aruba, is full of dramatic monologues spoken by those on the periphery of history. While I was working on these poems I lived in a world of paper: musty newspapers, yellowed memoirs, rubbings of headstone inscriptions. Everything crinkled and rustled.

And now everything clicks. After the death of our firstborn son ten hours after his birth, and the precarious entry via emergency c-section of our second son, I became obsessed with technology, with the machines that could do so much to detect and monitor and even, for a short time, sustain. The poems I’m working on now deal with a much emptier, more metallic world, populated by gnomes and witches, machines and satellites. This collection is basically an extended elegy, but the messaging, more than the experience of grief itself, is my struggle to make my peace with the technology that is bound to fail me.

And to occasionally resuscitate me: condolences that came electronically meant no less than the ones handwritten on creamy card stock. Other consolations: scraps I happen upon in recovered files and email messages—macerate. bramble of eyes. recoil of neck—unexpected gifts from my electronically-enhanced memory.

*

Optimists point to increased opportunities for subversion, more freedom through fracture. Alarmists warm how the increase of information without any context leads to exhaustion, to overload, and possibly, to the breakdown of our culture.

The social critic Neil Postman took the old adage about a man with a hammer to its logical conclusion: “To a man with a pencil, everything looks like a list. To a man with a camera, everything looks like an image. To a man with a computer, everything looks like data. And to a man with a grade sheet, everything looks like a number.”

But to a woman, to a writer with a laptop, an iPhone, and a Facebook account, what does everything look like? a burden? an opportunity?

I’m also reminded of Baudelaire’s writings on the flâneur, “the passionate spectator” of the bustling Parisian metropolis. He declares, “it is an immense joy to set up house in the middle of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite.”

Do you want to set up electronic house here, right here, after you finish your load of laundry and I run to the store for a six-pack? Can we toast to our distractions and agree to keep meeting in spite of them?

Shelley Puhak is a poet who lives in Baltimore, Maryland. Her first collection, Stalin in Aruba, won the 2010 Towson University Prize for Literature.  Her poems have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, New South, Third Coast, and many other journals. You can find out more about her at www.shelleypuhak.com

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