How will new technological inventions change poetry?
Here we come dangerously close to actually trying to give a definition of poetry. The word ‘poetry’ means a made thing and doesn’t define anything. People generally take it as an art form of combining words. Beyond that everything is up for grabs. The more exact term is ‘verse’. It exists today in relation to voice, body, speech, presence and memory. Some new forms of technology, like the Internet, are wonderful at distributing poetry. There are ways of playing games with words on the Internet and thus create your own poems. Personally I regard it as more of a game than an art form. The essential nature of verse will not change as it has been the same since pre-historic times. Poets have tried to use computers to write poems. No doubt, someday computers will be made to fall in love and have sex, so I guess they will write poems to each other as well. If you were frozen and then defrosted in 50 years, what would you do? See if my books are still around.
