February 04, 2008
MONDAY POEM
..
--yesterday at a local wired coffee house: the place is full,
but no one's talking --McSorley's Bar it's not.Internet Cafe
Jim Cullenywhere virtual folk
![]()
with cappuccinos
gather at tables
like islands of stone
in zen gardens,
faces lit by laptops—
and no one's apt to step
into the cool raked space between,
to be laughingly hugged or nudged
at key points in a repartee
that flies back and forth
on waves of beer-scented
breathRather, they sit
keyboarding thoughts into capacitors
that are Bluetoothed into broadband
and bound for distant counterparts
in other states and hemispheres
instead of being uploaded to
that other E-cocooned human
less than three feet away, breathing
to the left of the stacked biscottis,
keyboarding too, but longing for a
real spontaneous embrace
Painting of McSorley's Bar, artist unknown..
Posted by Jim Culleny at 12:11 AM | Permalink









Comments
Well, when I lug my laptop to a coffee shop, I usually don't spend my time hugging and chatting with the other patrons, whom I've never met before, either. Doesn't mean that I can't engage in these behaviors in other settings.
One strange characteristic of human beings is that we tend to exhibit quite different behaviors in different environments. If you prefer the environment of a bar to that of an Internet cafe, you know where you can spend your free time.
Posted by: JonJ | Feb 4, 2008 10:52:38 AM
Nice poem. Very true. At one time in history, coffee houses were full of intense discussion about politics, religion, philosophy. Internet cafes are pretty obviously a sad attempt for people feeling the alienation of communicating with strangers over the internet to come into contact with real people, real bodies. Loneliness, though a part of the human condition, is much starker and intense in western capitalist culture than in the more collective eastern cultures. The Chinese have many problems, but lonliness is not one of them.
Posted by: Jared | Feb 4, 2008 11:18:42 AM
Very nice, Jim. Thanks.
Posted by: Abbas Raza | Feb 4, 2008 12:07:37 PM
The language and especially the cadence of this poem belie the observation it is based on. (An unavoidable irony, perhaps!)
Posted by: Lloyd Mintern | Feb 4, 2008 2:15:22 PM
"The language and especially the cadence of this poem belie the observation it is based on."
Lloyd, This is interesting, but I don't know what you mean. Could you explain it a little more?
Posted by: Jared | Feb 4, 2008 2:55:51 PM
Lloyd, like Jared I'm interested in what you mean about language and cadence not fitting.
And Jon J. Though it's true we choose our social venues depending upon what we have in mind at the moment, this observation had to do with a sense of eeriness I felt at being in a room with 30 or 40 people arrayed against the walls, each occupying a table in subdued light, faces floating in bluelight LED halos, silent but for the fizz of an espresso machine. Nothing happening back and forth. All externally wired. Libraries have more buzz than that.
Maybe it's generational, but the coffee houses I remember were humming with the live conversation and argument of warm bodies with simmering minds.
I spend plenty of time online so I'm not knocking it --maybe it's just the contemporary version of reading the paper at the local luncheonette.
The poem just remarks on that contrast.
Thanks for your remarks.
Posted by: Jim | Feb 4, 2008 3:49:33 PM
Jim (and Jared)
The point is you couldn't get several of your lines like "keyboarding thoughts into capacitors
that are/ Bluetoothed into broadband", without the new experience. And not just that but there is a joy in the way you express it. It is hip, despite your avowed generational conflict, and sentiment toward previous days. Which I personally share. It is a very good poem; like I said the irony of the way it is expressed is unavoidable. Why that is so, is a more complex question. (I think it is because the language itself is kind of exploding with new meanings.) In my view this new Starbucks-type environment is fragile and susceptible to unique poetic expression (and that is real optimism!). Believe it or not I am going to Starbucks right now, and look over some blog-notes in one of those cozy chairs.
Posted by: Lloyd Mintern | Feb 4, 2008 4:38:43 PM
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