Sherry Chandler

Pinsky on technology and the language

Here’s that passage from Robert Pinsky in Rattle that I was thinking about yesterday. It is not directly relevant, I suppose, to what Ron Offen was saying, except insofar as it argues that technology is actually linguistically conservative:

Language has become so conservative in modern times, though we pretend to find it changing. The more technology there is, the more language tends to be frozen and stay the same. In a pre-literary culture, language changes very rapdily. . . . It’s an arrogance or a misapprehension of the present to think, Oh we’re changing the language so rapidly, with our computers and cellphones; but no. The computer technology and the rest of it—we may get a few neologisms out of our technology, and slang expressions always are generated. But compared to the past, each new form of communication technology freezes the language a little bit more, removes it from the fluidity of oral communication. . . . we’re responsible for always trying to think about what’s good, what’s bad in language—which is to say, what’s meaningless, what’s empty, what’s jargon, what’s hollow—that whole George Orwell project is suitable because language is always manipulated by some crooks or the other, often quite powerful crooks, trying to steal or bully. And it’s healthy to question the precision or expressive usefulness of language as it is used. But maybe it’s also, equally, healthy to accept the inventiveness of language.

In pondering this question of ephemerality, it occurs to me that poetry is always ephemeral. Little print magazines come and go as rapidly as little on-line magazines do and they disappear pretty completely except for a few archived copies. Geof Huth has done good work in this area.

It has also been my experience that one can find just as much bad poetry in print as online, but I’m a democrat and think there should be outlets for anybody who wants to put work out there. And actually, it’s not the downright bad poetry that is such a problem. Sometimes it can have great energy. It’s the mediocre poetry that is deadly. And yet, people seem to like it.

But back to the point: we not only lose magazines, we also lose the language and the culture from which the poetry was generated, as Harry has pointed out in his recent discussion of Beowulf.

As I said yesterday, I’m old and I like that idea of having my poetry in a book that I can hold in my hand and pass down to my intellectual grandchildren. I also like the idea of an “album” of music and resist buying songs one at a time for an mpg player.

But at base, I think both art and language are a great ever-changing dynamic. Once they’re set, they’re dead.