UPDATE:Thank you for your responses. I find it fascinating to learn how people use technology for writing.

I use Google for light research — to find a name or date. I do double check sources. It’s curious how we learn if a site is trustworthy or not. Most likely, a site won’t lie about a date, but it could be wrong. For those of you who are teachers, I wonder if teaching what kinds of sites are trustworthy is something you find yourself doing. I’m not suggesting that research on the internet would trump library research, but it seems important to teach students the signs of a shifty web site.

Thank you all for this conversation.

I was about to write my NaPoWriMo poem and started thinking about using Google for research. One the one hand, I can see poets not wanting to admit to using Google at all. Use technology to create poetry? The horror. However, if we were photographers or musicians, we would have embraced technology years ago.

When I was at a colony, a musician/drummer showed me how he ‘wrote’ music on his computer (no more sheets of paper filled with pencil marks for this person) and how he could ‘move’ the instruments around in a composition to hear what it would sound like. For centuries, musicians have heard the music in their heads. Does the technology lend more accuracy? Is the human mind or the computer more forgiving of mistakes?

When I first read the anagram poems of Peter P. and Kelli R.A., I had no idea that they might be using software to do so. I stumbled across the software and was amazed at what it can do in terms of switching letters around and helping poets create art. I have read Peter’s ‘Anagrammers’ poem to start off one of my own readings and we’ve published one of Kelli’s anagram poems, so you know my opinion of the work that can be created with the help of technology.

Of course, I could be inventing the assessment that poets abhor the idea of using technology to create poems (beyond a laptop, of course).

What do you think? Do you ever use Google to write poems? What other technology (beyond your computer) do you use to compose a poem?