Today, we challenge you to write a poem that similarly bridges (whether smoothly or not) the seeming divide between poetry and technological advances.
Before GPS, a gas station man drew the turn after the school on a paper bag. Forty years he’d lived here. Now the phone knows. Knew before I asked. Blue dot moving through blue lines on a street that has no color in real life, only asphalt, cut grass coming through the window. Turn left in 500 feet. I turn. The voice carries no memory of the dead end, or October, a county road, sun going down, crying into a map that had no update. It won’t forgive a missed turn either. Just: recalculating. As though the world is always correctable, the route rebuilt from here.
Prompt Inspiration
Via NaPoWriMo
Poetry is an ancient art, and one that revisits themes that existed thousands of years ago – love, nature, jealousy. But that doesn’t mean that poets live in a sort of pre-history unaffected by technological advances. Emily Dickinson wrote about trains, and I’m rather charmed by this 1981 poem about the “incredible hair” of actors on television. In a more recent example, Becca Klaver’s “Manifesto of the Lyric Selfie” draws inspiration from the contemporary drive to document everything in digital photographs.
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