Books Column: A lost river of words: how poetry is vanishing before our screen-weary eyes

At university, I had a poetry professor who dressed in black lace, like Helena Bonham Carter in the Harry Potter films. The professor preceded the films by several years, but she still somehow played the “good witch” version of Bonham Carter’s Bellatrix Lestrange; perhaps the Gothic undercurrents that rippled around transatlantic youth culture during the decades prior count as their common ancestor.

The professor, who pronounced the word “poem” as though the last two letters were transposed (how wonderful to hear her introduce, gravely but with a tremor of delight at the corners of her mouth, a new “pome” in class each day), taught me a lesson that only materialised decades later, with the advent of the internet.

The lesson was, in short, that poetry is unGoogleable. To Google, in fact, it is a form of writing that is already extinct.

All other types of text bend the knee to the mighty search algorithms. If you’re seeking an essay that you read some years back, whose central idea you suddenly find pertinent to your life again; or if you need to track down the name of a writer whose short story collection, the details of which you only vaguely recall, you think might please a friend; or if you’re just trying to find that one especially wicked article about Arsenal that was in the Guardian last week; well, spend a few minutes Googling it – a quarter-hour at most – and your quest will chivalrously rush to meet you with its own completion. Here, on a silver platter, dished up from the infinite archive of words, the specific item that you wanted. Good day.

But when it comes to poetry? Google gaslights us all.

For years, I have been searching for a poem (“pome”) that the professor taught, whose only bit I can recall is an answer to a rhetorical question about feasting on one’s own heart. Namely, this chilling bit: “it asks why not / it says once more”. Now, try Googling the keyword string “poem eat heart asks why not says once more” and see how far you get. Nothing of worth shall be forthcoming on your screen. The poem lies in various repositories of paper somewhere – but it will not cross the book-silicon brain barrier.

Just like, as by now you may have guessed, the professor’s name. She was there for a semester, then gone, her identity and the extraordinary “pomes” she taught blown to the four winds, thanks mostly to my callow exuberance as I lined up courses and barrelled through them, keeping few records.

Occasionally, with poetry and Google, you get lucky. Such is the case with a work by Mary Kiznie, also a poet, and also my professor at university. I remember Prof Kinzie with incredible clarity, for she was the director of our programme; much hinged on her whims. Years after I graduated, she published a volume that included a poem which obliquely ventures, in my reading, the most novel etymology for the word “fuck” that’s out there.

For some reason, I found myself grasping for this poem recently. But I would never have been able to track the verse down – try Googling “fuck poem” and see how far you get – had I not remembered the specific Latin term that Prof Kinzie disintered from antiquity to centre it around: offoco, which means to force something into someone’s mouth. In the case of Kinzie’s poem, the object being forced was a jigger of hot lead. Someone pours a jigger of hot lead down your throat, then truly, you’re offocked.

Kinzie’s poem is the exception that proves the rule, however. In the digital age, poetry is the last stand of the recondite. Poetry is anti-information; it refuses to be organised.

Consider WH Auden – the “stop all the clocks” fellow – whose achievement, fame and prodigious output should have been the makings of an eminently Googleable writer. But dip into any book of his – the hard-copy variety, perhaps one found on a shelf in a library – and, alongside the sheer revelations of language within, you’ll find a vast accompanying digital silence. The writer’s words, plain and musical, are not arrangeable by algorithm: the bulk of Auden’s oeuvre, which relies on metre, rhyme, exquisite timing, and other ineffable qualities for its intelligence, breaks down into mere primary school diction that does not scan when fed to a machine.

I know this from firsthand experience.

Long ago I held one of his books in the stacks of a library, entranced, gazing upon immortal phrase after immortal phrase, including the following couplet, which I scribbled down in a diary, without even noting the poem that it came from (that terrible crashing exuberance again):

Hunt the lion, climb the peak /
No one guesses you are weak.

– WH Auden

Google it. It’s barely there, barely in the machine, and if you misremember or mistype the words even slightly, it’s less than a remnant, it’s a straw that cannot be sought, much less grasped. 

Hundreds of Auden’s felicities like this are waiting to be stumbled upon and intelligently transcribed for future discovery; but there’s no person to do it; and so the algorithm, which lives or dies by specificity, and shuns context, erases as it indexes.

As the archive of our civilisation becomes ever more digitised, I’m minded of the fragments of Sappho, who wrote a whole world into being, but whose “tongue was smashed” (to borrow from Fragment 31, translated by Spraggs) when the bulk of her verse didn’t make it out of the 500s BCE. Every poet today is a future Sappho; every poem a pale fading straw – or, occasionally, a lucky fragment, a signal from our time to the one that lies ahead, a snippet of wonder and mystery, fished out by chance from a lost river of words. DM