The Tweetless Poet

After Billy Collins softly lambasted e-readers, it seemed like poetry and technology were doomed to an unhappy marriage.

Not so, according to Sandra Beasley, who offers an insightful critique on technology and poetry in an interview with Nic Sebastian of the poetry blog “Very like a whale.” Beasley explains why she doesn’t Tweet (“think of little birds, each scraping the tip of an outstretched wing-feather along the face of the mountain. Soon the whole damn rock is worn away”) and why sometimes a poem is better off tethered to the page than floating on the screen. She makes a case as to why technology can be both a blessing and a burden (but yes, she is on Facebook):

From Very like a whale:

What do you like most about how other poets use technology?

I’m drawn to times when poets use hyperlinking to create a constellation of creative sources and resources they care about. That constellation may go on display in a website with multiple authors (HTMLGIANT , The Rumpus ), a blog that seems mimetic of an individual personality (Ron Silliman , C. Dale Young), or even just one single sprawling online essay or post that makes a cultural argument. It’s not that only poets do this, but I love that poets are among those who do, and that I have this way of encountering them as three-dimensional personalities in the two-dimensional space of a computer screen.

What should Poetry do with or about technology that it has not yet done?

There’s got to be more poetic cell phone sounds out there—let’s get our best voices at work on the problem. What we need is the Edgar Allan Poe ring of bells, bells, bells. Perhaps the vibrate mode that echoes the buzz of a fly when it dies. And who doesn’t want a ding announcing that yes, your text message is slouching toward Bethlehem

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