I am old enough to have sat in a classroom of electric typewriters in middle school, my friends and I transcribing words from a textbook--lessons of placing our fingers just so on keyboards and learning the muscle memory of letters. Where the "a" and "z" were. How to underline and backspace. The best days, however, happened around holidays when the teacher (an owlish, high-strung man who ended up having a nervous breakdown halfway through the schoolyear) distributed worksheets with instructions like "ten spaces, type AA, 15 spaces, type aKKKKaaa . . ." until an image would appear. A pumpkin. Christmas tree. Abraham Lincoln's face.
It was my first real lesson in using language to create wonder. I suppose it was one of my first lessons in poetry, too. Letters and emptiness into words into lines into pictures. I loved the concreteness of the final product, us becoming little typographical van Goghs in the basement of C. L Phelps, in a room just down the hall from the gym and cafeteria. At home, I would sit at my mom's old Underwood, trying to conjure the face of Martin Luther King Jr. or Captain Kangaroo with lowercase and capital A's and G's and punctuation marks.
Billy Collins makes some midnight typewriter noise . . .
Royal Aristocrat
by: Billy Collins
My old typewriter used to make so much noise
I had to put a cushion of newspaper
beneath it late at night
so as not to wake the whole house.
Even if I closed the study door
and typed a few words at a time--
the best way to work anyway--
the clatter of keys was still so loud
that the gray and yellow bird
would wince in its cage.
Some nights I could even see the moon
frowning down at me through the winter trees.
That was twenty years ago,
yet as I write this with my soft lead pencil
I can still hear that distinctive sound,
like small arms fire across a border,
one burst after another
as my wife turned in her sleep.
I was a single monkey
trying to type the opening lines of my Hamlet,
often doing nothing more
than ironing pieces of paper in the platen
then wrinkling them into balls
to flick into the wicker basket.
Still, at least I was making noise,
adding to the great secretarial din,
that chorus of clacking and bells,
thousands of desks receding into the past.
And that was more than can be said
for the mute rooms of furniture,
the speechless cruets of oil and vinegar,
and the tall silent hedges surrounding the house.
Such deep silence on those nights--
just the sound of my typing
and a few stars singing a song their mother
sang when they were mere babies in the sky.
Those middle school typewriter lessons did pay off. Nowadays, I do type things at night on my laptop when everyone else has gone to bed. However, the sound from a computer keyboard is obviously much quieter. Working on a typewriter sounds, as Collins says, like "small arms fire across a border." Working on a computer sounds like light rain on a window or drumming fingers on a table. It's a different visceral experience.
When I started college, PCs were just coming into vogue. Printers were of the dot matrix variety, loud and attached to reams paper that snaked into the rear of the device. Word processors were a revelation. No more backspacing and Xing things out. No more Bic Wite-Out. Reorganizing and editing became a matter of a couple of keystrokes.
That was over 30 years ago now. I've learned that I can't write poems on a keyboard. I need a pen in my hand, a notebook in front of me. Poetry is about being in the moment. There's something physically present about pushing a pen across a page. It's almost like painting. How a poem looks on paper is just as important as what a poem says. So, for me, I need to see that poem bleed out of the nib of my fountain pen into my journal before I can move to the next step of typing it up.
Collins' poem also holds silence in reverence. The "mute rooms of furniture" and "speechless cruets of oil and vinegar." Poets need both sound and silence to work. At least the poet typing this blog post does. It's a matter of making the right noise to fill that silence. That's the job of poets and poetry. For Collins, it's the stop/start of typing "a few words at a time." Finding the right word or phrase can be a struggle sometimes. Other times, it can be like taking dictation from the stars--"singing a song their mother / sang when they were mere babies in the sky."
Saint Marty is now done making noise on his keyboard tonight. There's some kind of bird outside his window (or maybe it's a star), singing in the darkness.
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