Talk for launch of Australian Poetry Journal, Issue 2, Technology, June 2012.

By Patricia Sykes

I’ve titled this preamble From Neanderthal to app and I begin idiosyncratically, with a question to myself: is interactive technology capable of functioning as muse? The nine classical muses, said to collaborate in the ordering of the world, were celebrated by the disciples of Pythagoras as “keepers of the knowledge of harmony and the principles of the universe”, which allowed humans “access to the everlasting gods”. This is a statement of faith as well as a claim of privilege and it seems to me that some futurists would like to claim the same for technology. I’m not a Luddite but I am something of a refusenik: I want to maintain a distance between creator and tool. If our era were to define a world order, along the lines of the Elizabethan World Order, ie God, Angels, Humanity and so on down to the insects, where would technology be placed?

Every generation of course uses the tools specific to its discoveries and aspirations, and we’ve been inscribing the planet in one way or another  ─ and more recently our solar system ─ since Neanderthal times. When I began school life the permitted tool was a slate pencil. It was tied to a piece of string which was tied to a corner of the slate. The slate had only a small surface so it needed to be erased frequently. Erasure was by organic method. You spat onto a cloth and then wiped the slate clean.

My next tool was a pencil. When you had mastered printing you were permitted to progress to cursive writing. When you could write perfectly between the lines, at the designated height, you were permitted to write with a pen, which consisted of a tapered handle, wider at the top. Inside the top was a metal slot into which a nib was inserted. The ink (black, blue or red) was contained in an inkwell into which you dipped the nib: the most poetic aspect of ink wells was how the ink seeped up to striate the petals of the jonquils we stuck in them during winter. This was also an era of much blotting paper: write, blot, write, blot.

Then came the fountain pen. Then the biro, which only became widely accepted in schools in the 1950s. Until then it had been considered injurious to the quality of writing. Then came typewriter, then word processor, then computer and its enhanced facility for memorising and storage. In the time of the slate with its frequent erasures, brain memory was essential. Rote learning too. During and immediately after the end of WWii there was simply not enough paper for school children to write on. Now memory is becoming more a matter of technological storage and retrieval and I’m very aware of this in my own practice.

And so to neuro plasticity: is the tool taking over from its human creator, shaping and attuning the human as it were, and if so what implications might this have for the writing, reading and appreciating of poetry? Susan Greenfield, the neuroscientist, argues that the rise in IQ ascribed to the visual era of the VDU, or visual display unit, indicates a greater facility with process but not with content. In her view the human brain is being changed by the technological dominance of the visual.

While in Canberra recently I came across four pages in The Canberra Times celebrating Italian National Day. One of the features, Science, technology and innovation, included a description of the iCub, developed at the Instituto Italiano di Technologica in Genoa, as an “open source platform for research into humanoid robotics, brain and cognitive sciences” and which has the capacity “to learn to have natural interactions and to learn from humans”. It’s perhaps no accident that the iCub is shaped like a child “with hands for manipulating objects and…sensors for seeing, hearing and touching”. Therefore cute and non-threatening, on the surface at least. Thus far the iCub is a responder rather than an initiator. But what if further development turns it into an initiator? What if it begins using humans as amanuenses, even apps?

I didn’t have any of this in mind, nor even the theme of technology, when I wrote A flight of leftovers, nor when I submitted it to the journal as part of a small unrelated batch of poems. Which brings me to the process I used in the creation of the poem. I frequently use a voice recorder when I’m driving. No sooner am I behind the steering wheel than a line or an image will slip into my mind and by the time I reach the next set of traffic lights it can have vanished. The recorder is simple technology, relying on batteries and reel-to-reel recording and playback. A year after I began using the device I started to wonder what I was going to do with the accumulating material. The fact that I had a lot of it didn’t matter because I had transcribed it and stored it in computer memory and hey presto retrieval does the rest.

So I was at my desk, having typed out final versions of two poems I’d written by hand and planned to submit, when my eyes alighted on a folder of transcribed recordings. I opened it, reading at random, noting a recurrence of themes, and decided to see what eventuated if I selected a few entries and got them talking to each other in a poem. In the process I discarded some images and lines, in full or in part, wrote new ones, rearranged, re-wrote, and finally arrived at a final draft. I could not have done this without the aid of recorder, computer and printer. Nor could they have fulfilled their functions if I had not fed them.

I wonder what Homer’s response would have been to such tools. I recently heard a Radio National discussion on The Iliad’s first print run, which would have amounted to roughly six painstakingly handwritten copies. Subsequent reprints would have been the of the same order: how different literary history would be without the printing press. I can’t quite imagine reading The Iliad on a Kindle or similar device. To hold the entire book in your hand is to hold the journey. It’s the tactility of a book that I’d find difficult to give up. I find it interesting that the iCub has been designed to include sensory capacity, as if the developers knew that such a capacity would make it more acceptable to its human inter-actors.

I think one of the ways technology spoils and deludes us is through the dubious reward of immediacy, things at the fingertips, quick, quick, quick. Perhaps it’s because I was born in an era when it was still the practice that I value the organic aspects of writing poetry, the writing by hand, the musings and interactions between hand and mind. I’ve long been fascinated by the Chinese perception of calligraphy, how they named it the greatest art because there is no first draft, no erasure, no editing, only finished object: the idea or form travelling into the mind, down the arm into the hand onto the page in one fluid movement: breathless! In contrast my poem is a worked and re-worked thing, laboured over.  

Patricia Sykes is an award-winning poet, and a librettist, whose work has been described as ‘leaping over boundaries’. Her most recent work is 'The Abbotsford Mysteries' published by Spinifex Press.