Computer Technology and Poetry

I have written about my use of word processors, databases, and computer technology as tools for literary production in response to this article in the New York Times.

The Muses of Insert, Delete and Execute
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/26/books/a-literary-history-of-word-processing.html

I started writing on an Apple IIe in the school library when I was a sophomore at Auburn Adventist Academy near Seattle in 1981, and stored them on 5 inch floppy disks. I also obtained an old 1950 style typewriter, and used that to write poetry while I was at home. I wrote lots of my earliest poems on mainframe systems at Walla Walla University 1984-6, and Washington State University 1986-8. While I stored them in my account on the mainframe, I printed out all poems on paper at that time.

Then I started using Microsoft Word to write poetry when it first came out in 1993 when I was working as a word processor at a small company in Seattle, and stored them on 3.5 inch floppy disks. Because I did not own a computer then, I started also writing in black sketch books with a fountain pen, filling about 40 of them over the next five years as I lived in Seattle, and then hitchhiked around the country. I still carry a black sketch book with me at all times in case I am inspired to write while away from my home computer.

While I was hitchhiking, I wrote poetry in sketchbooks, but I also spent a lot of time playing guitar on street corners. I had a small portable tape recorder, so I would hang it around my neck, turn it on, and start improvising a song, then turn it off when I finished. I filled about 80 tapes with improvised songs. I have transcribed about 50 poems from about 5 tapes, but have that project on hold. Most of those poems were composed 1993-5 and, though I have a tape transcription machine, most of those poems are still not in digital format.

I wrote poetry and posted it online when I started a GeoCities account in 1997 when I was in Charleston, South Carolina. While I was in Kansas City, Missouri I would walk to the university library and compose poems that were stored on the GeoCities site. I also kept them stored on 3.5 inch floppy disks.

While house-sitting in San Diego California for two years I was able to buy my first laptop in 1998, and I transferred, organized, and stored all the poems on one Iomega zip drive. I spent a few months in Portland, Oregon early 1999 scanning several thousand poems on paper in digital format and stored them on the zip drive.

I got a job as web designer at State of Michigan in 1999, so I bought a desktop. I started using NotePad to write poems instead of Word because it preserves text without any extraneous code to indicate formatting.

I created a database using Microsoft Access in 2002, and I started inserting all the poems I had in digital format at that time, and then I spent about a year transcribing all the poems in about 30 of the black sketchbooks, because 10 of them disappeared in a lost box that had poems I wrote in 1994.

Once I finished transcribing and inserting all the poems into the database, I continued writing poems with NotePad and inserting them into the database. I now have around 7,800 poems in the database. I have been able to do mass spell-checking, and search and replace functions for various words that I once routinely misspelled.

I bought several domains such as Gothinia.com for the title Gothinia Chronicle, and Angeliad.net for the title Angeliad, and presented the poems online in a database-driven website for several years, 2001-7. I stored the poems in a MySQL database, and wrote code using PHP that queried the database and presented lists of poem titles by alphabet, year, and location, that were hotlinked to each poem.

While I was a graduate student 2005-8, earning a MS in Geographic Information Science, I continued writing poetry and storing them in the database, but I dropped the domain sites. For a while in 2005-6 I would add geographic locations in decimal degrees format in the database record for individual narrative poems, indicating a location for the action. Then using PHP coded pages, I generated poems from the online database in GML code format so the poems would appear as scrolls on Google Earth where they could be accessed and read on that 3D globe. I saved the result as a KML file which can be shared with anyone who can read them on Google Earth.

After I graduated and got cartography jobs in North Carolina and Georgia, I posted poems daily on blog sites like http://open.salon.com/blog/surazeus and http://surazeus.blogspot.com for several years 2008-11, but then last summer I went through all the blog sites where I was posting poems and deleted them all, as I became worried that someone might copy them all and publish them for sale as ebooks without my knowledge.

I also bought a JVC 20GB video camera with a built-in hard drive. When I write a poem in song lyric format, I put the poem in a Word document on the computer screen, set the video camera on a stack of books, then play guitar and record myself singing the lyrics. I have loaded just over 200 song videos at http://youtube.com/Surazeus over the last several years 2008-11, and will continue to do so.

I am able to use the multiple-letter generation function with queries in Word to insert records from the Access database to generate documents. So in 2010, I formatted all the poems in the database into a three volume set that can be printed in paper format. Those books are now available for sale at http://Lulu.com/Angeliad online as purchase-on-demand products. I also used the letter function to insert poems in blocks of HTML code designed for the Kindle ebook format, so I generated 16 ebooks from all the poems in the database which are for sale at http://amzn.to/jzG4vi online.

I currently have my database and textfiles of poems stored on an external hard drive, which I back up to the hard drive of a new desktop computer, and periodically burn to a backup compact disk.

I am writing an epic in blank verse about scientists from Thales to Einstein, composing them with NotePad. I post occasional excerpts at the two blog sites mentioned above, as well as on http://Facebook.com/Surazeus and https://profiles.google.com/Surazeus at Google Plus.

Eventually I will store the episodes of this epic in a database, then I will format them in a paper printed book format using Word, and in HTML format for an ebook to be read on the Kindle. I will also use Adobe InDesign to create an epub format ebook for sale at the Barnes and Nobles website to be read on the Nook.

After starting my epic on 16 July 2011, after 6 months it is currently at 11,000 lines, and I project the final product will have between 100,000 and 200,000 lines. For comparison, Paradise Lost has 10,000, Iliad has 50,000, and Mahabharata has 100,000 lines. I feel that I am able to compose the poetry quickly because I can type 80 words per minute, and I have been practicing composing poetry for 25 years mostly using computers to write, so I am very comfortable and adept with the technology.

I am very grateful for computer technology, word processors and databases, as they provide powerful tools for quickly creating, editing, and formatting literary products for presentation in various formats.