Technology as Subject - Poems That Actually Engage With How We Live Now

[BretHart_99]

There is a lot of poetry that mentions technology without really engaging with it. A poem that name-drops a smartphone or uses wifi as a metaphor is not the same as a poem that genuinely grapples with what it feels like to live inside the systems we live inside.

Sharing this week partly because I have been thinking about what it means to write seriously about AI, quantum computing, and the pace of change without just making reference poems. The best work on this seems to come from unexpected angles.

What poetry, old or new, do you think genuinely engages with technology rather than just using it as scenery?

[Chris_50]

Alice Oswald is interesting here. She does not write about technology directly but her work on rivers and time and attention feels like the correct counter-argument to acceleration culture

[TaxSeason37]

Frank Bidart's work on obsession and embodiment feels relevant to AI discourse even though none of it is explicitly about AI. The questions about what counts as intention or experience run through it

[Janette_63]

I think the most honest technology poetry right now is the stuff that admits it does not know what it is looking at. The work that claims to understand AI is usually the least convincing

[Arty Candle]

The Language poets were doing something structurally interesting about communication and meaning decades before the internet changed everything. Ron Silliman's blog is the bridge between that work and now

[Sienna89]

Claudia Rankine's work on documentary poetry, incorporating news and public language into lyric, feels like a more honest response to information overload than work that tries to aestheticise it

[Andy81]

I keep coming back to WH Auden's Musee des Beaux Arts. Not about technology at all but the idea of suffering occurring while someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along is exactly how I experience reading catastrophic news between ordinary moments

[IdlePhoenix]

The brutalist plain-speech approach, just saying what is happening in clean declarative sentences, is underused in technology poetry and probably more accurate than the lyric impulse to beautify things