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?
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
Deborah–
Great post! I’ve actually started going to a coffeeshop w/out wi-fi because I can spend too much time “researching” than writing.
However, I love the anagrammer site and Babelfish–though I don’t use Babelfish as much.
I think Google can be quite helpful for a writer, I know when I haven’t been able to come up the names of moons for a planet or have questions about names of craters, I’ve been able to find stuff much faster than anywhere else. But it can be a distraction and I’d say 94% of my poems are google-free poems.
I use Google to research fairly often. Though you have to be careful with what you find, as sometimes it is not accurate. have you seen the site “Get a Google Poem?”
I also like Babel Fish for translating, Markov Text Generators for mashing together texts, and of course, Anagram Genius.
There are also a lot of sites about word histories and etymologies that are a lot of fun.
Leevi Lehto (http://www.levilehto.net) has a customized Google Poem Generator that’s fun to develop custom starters with: http://www.leevilehto.net/google/google.asp (check out the Google poem anthology, too – I have one way back on the list).
I use Babelfish sometimes for rapid re-re-re-translation starters (take a line in English, send it to German, bring it back, send it to French, bring it back, then use whatever of it makes sense). Haven’t done anything mich anagrams yet because Peter and Kelli have done it so well I feel like a weak imitator.
Other interesting technology starter sources: Odd error messages, juxtaposition of concepts from different fields of technology (not computer technology per se, but one that finds me a lot because of the day job).
This is a great topic. There’s an article in this somewhere.
When writing, I use the Internet as a quick source to move me closer to my subject. This happens most often when I feel the subject moving through me – when I know I’m going to write a piece, but before I’ve started the writing process. Google is my search engine of choice. I use books, films, periodicals, television… But, once the writing is underway, research gets in the way. I may go back after a draft is done, but not until then.
I write by hand with a pen and a paper notebook. Up until a couple of years ago, I typed my poems on a portable manual typewriter. I recently (on the internet – ha! – ) tracked down a company in the U.S. that still sells manual typewriters. I’ve thought about getting one. (My old one still works though the rubber roller is getting a bit stiff with age.)
I’ve never used Google for writing poems, having a hard time thinking how I might. For research, yes, sure, if I need to know some fact or date or something.
Just for fun, I tried using the Google translation feature once, to translate a poem from Spanish (a language I can read more or less functionally). The poem was by Lorca, if I remember right. The Google translation was ludicrous. It can’t translate in context. A name like “San Juan” — which could mean the city of San Juan or the person Saint John — might be translated by Google as “holy John.”
Actually, writers have been using technology for centuries, to publish anyway. And, in a sense, writing is itself a recent technology — it’s only been around for a tiny sliver of human history.
I stopped using Babelfish when it translated adultery as “inaccuracy.”