Poems About Technology - Share Your Favourites Old or New

[ReacherLynx]

Given what this forum covers, I am curious what poems about technology resonate with people here. Not necessarily poems that are enthusiastic about technology but poems that engage with it seriously in any direction.

The lineage goes back further than you might think. Poems about the telegraph, factories, the telephone. The question of how human experience changes when communication and computation change is not a new one.

Share something you love, something that surprised you, or something you wrote yourself.

[Arty Scout]

Tracy K. Smith's Life on Mars engages with technology through cosmology and grief in a way that has stuck with me for years. The Richard Feynman poem specifically is remarkable

[SortedMate]

Frank O'Hara's personal mythology about New York in the 1950s feels relevant in an odd way to how some people talk about AI now. The city as something ambient and intelligent and indifferent

[StoneCold_Mike]

I keep returning to Anne Carson for this. Her fragmentary forms feel appropriate to how digital information actually works, even when she is writing about ancient Greece

[MurkyVoyager]

Muriel Rukeyser's The Book of the Dead about the Hawk's Nest Tunnel disaster is the best industrial technology poem I know. The corporate documents she works into the verse are devastating

[Shane88]

There is a whole subgenre of contemporary poetry about surveillance and data that varies wildly in quality. The best ones resist the temptation to just be outraged

[SuperPosition52]

I wrote something last year about autocomplete finishing my sentences before I knew what I wanted to say. The experience of being anticipated is genuinely uncanny

[Amber99]

Kenneth Koch's paean to New York pleasures has a joie de vivre about the built environment I find useful as a corrective when technology discourse gets too anxious