Jan 2023 – Machine Time

Though it was Burns Night, our topic was Machines. Happily we managed to find two poems bringing these together.

The rapidly increasing proficiency of Artificial Intelligence in composition has been much in the news lately, so it was very appropriate to have a poem written by a machine alongside the poems about machines. It was a quite passable villanelle, based on a few inputs by David Aldred. It certainly was as intelligible to me as many modern poems allegedly written by humans – such as the baffling second half of the imagist poet Marianne Moore’s ‘To a steam roller’.

Ken Gambles’ ‘V2-E2 27 March 1945’ poignantly records the fate of those east-enders who died in the last London bomb of WW2.

A WW2 tank features in ‘Vergissmeinnicht’ by Keith Douglas, but it’s mainly a tender love poem.

Another well-known WW2 poem, Henry Reed’s ‘Naming of parts’ draws amusing parallels between military machinery and the natural signs of spring. Richard Brautigan’s 1967 poem ‘All watched over by machines of loving grace’ imagines a future where machines and nature live in mutual harmony and fellowship. But in Philip Larkin’s ‘The mower’ a machine destroys a peaceful creature; in Robert Burns’ ‘To a mouse’ the poor mouse is disturbed by the plough, and in RS Thomas’ poem, ‘Cynddylan on a tractor’ disturbs nature by his boisterous driving of his new machine.

The ‘drivers’ of a racing bike and a harpsichord feature in Michael Donaghy’s ‘Machine 2000’. This has an interesting structure in which the central of seventeen lines is the longest and the only one without a matching end rhyme.

‘The last trip home’ is a song lyric by Davy Steele of the Battlefield Band, lamenting the supplanting of magnificent shire horses by machinery. Wordsworth’s sonnet ‘Steamboats, viaducts and railways’ is aware of the disruptive effect of the new transport systems but celebrates their speed. Kipling’s ‘The secret of the machines’ is a splendid ballad-like poem in which modern machines of all kinds boast of their power, though – for the time being – they are ultimately controlled by Man. But John Updike’s ‘Recitative for punished products’ – including a typewriter and a watch – concludes with a warning that they might one day turn on their manufacturers. A tea-making machine turns on its owner in Muriel Spark’s comical ‘Fruitless fable’.

In Burns’ ‘To the weaver’s gin ye go’, a young lass is seduced by the to-and-fro working of the loom by a bonny weaver. Colette Bryce tells another cheeky tale in which advantage is taken of the temporary privacy inside a ‘Car wash’.

We were delighted when the reading of Brian Bilston’s ‘Alexa, what is there to know about love?’ evoked a response from the pub’s Alexa, who when then asked to recite a poem responded with a limerick.

In extracts from Book 6 of Milton’s ‘Paradise lost’ we heard how Satan invented war machines using ‘adusted’ ‘dark materials’ mined from beneath the ground. Although they are not given a name, we worked out that they are cannons. But they aren’t effective against Michael and the good angels, who respond by ripping up mountains to flatten the bad guys.

The power and excitement of steam trains is celebrated by Walt Whitman in ‘A locomotive in winter’, ‘The express’ by Stephen Spender, and ‘Engines in the National Railway Museum’ by John Ward. The last relishes the names of the steam locomotives. Simon Armitage’s rollicking ‘The metaphor now standing at Platform 8’ makes fun out of train travel but ‘If my train will come’ by Katrina Porteous suggests embarking on a very momentous journey. This poem is inscribed on the wall of a bookshop in the former Alnwick Station.