When Robert Browning was asked to become the first poet to be recorded, on an Edison wax cylinder in 1889, he forgot his own poem. In the second episode of their series, Sarah Howe and Sandeep Parmar consider what happens when poetry, and poets, meet technology, and why a poem itself can, in Paul Valéry’s description, be such a powerful ‘kind of machine’. They explore ambivalent attitudes to technology in three poems: Mina Loy’s ‘Time Bomb’ is a reflection on the extreme destruction of the atomic bomb and the power of scientific discovery; Lavinia Greenlaw’s ‘A World Where News Travelled Slowly’ charts a history of technology that involves the gradual removal of the human body from methods of communication; and in Jorie Graham’s ‘Honeycomb’, fragments of technology reveal a divided self sitting at a desk in front of a computer, seen but not known by multiple tools of surveillance.

Read Jorie Graham's poem in the LRB here: https://lrb.me/ptwgraham

Mina Loy's 'Time Bomb' is published in 'The Lost Lunar Baedeker' (Carcanet, 1997, edited by Roger L Conover)

For more discussions like this try the LRB's Close Readings podcast, which covers literature from Ancient Greece to the present day.

Get 25% off a 12-month subscription with the code 'POETRY25' at checkout here: https://lrb.me/crpoetry

Book tickets for the live recording on 8 July: https://lrb.me/poetrytickets

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