Laptop keyboard
New sentences … a man types on a laptop keyboard. Photograph: PhotoAlto / Alamy
In an interview with the Paris Review, the American poet Frederick Seidel mentions a time in the 1970s when
he visited an old girlfriend at Columbia University. Seidel’s girlfriend was studying for a PhD in Electrical Engineering and during his stay the poet was given five minutes to work in a secure room on the Defence Department mainframe:
“The computer was enormous and filled the room but it had such a tiny screen. I typed out the beginning of my poem Homage to Cicero and was hooked then and there. What hooked me was the way you could instantly change the shape of the stanza, the length of the line. It was the instantly part that got me.”
With ebooks on course to outsell printed editions in the UK by 2018 much has been written about the subject of technology in terms of readers, but it’s often overlooked that new tech does more than give writers a different cut of cloth to scribble on. Writing with electronic devices has affected structure, research and editing. It has affected order and it has affected rhythm, from the tap-tap-swipe of a typewriter to the swipe-swipe-tap of tablet.