The Internet
An ocean we all live beside now: write the tide, not the plumbing.
Quick answer: Learn to write poems about the internet: imagery, craft techniques, mistakes to avoid, exercises and prompts, in this free theme guide by Writory for poets.
What this theme is
The internet is too large to be a subject, which is exactly why poets need it. Like the sea or the city before it, it only becomes writable at human scale: one search typed at 4 a.m., one name entered into a box years after a parting, one comment thread where strangers were briefly kind. Poems about the internet succeed the way poems about the ocean succeed, not by describing all of it, but by standing one person at its edge and watching what washes up.
It is also our era's memory palace and its haunted house. Everything is kept: the embarrassing photograph, the review written by someone now dead, the message board where a vanished friendship is still arguing about football in 2009. The theme naturally holds permanence and loss in the same hand.
Why poets return to it
Poets write the internet because it is where longing now leaves records. The search history is a confessional document; the 3 a.m. query, “how to know if,” half-typed and abandoned, is already a found poem. There is also the archive's strange grief: the dead remain online, findable, mid-sentence. Writory's monthly contest regularly receives poems on digital life from every continent, and the ones that score well treat the internet as a place where feeling happens, not as a talking point. The judges' criteria, creativity, emotion, structure, language, theme, reward the specific search over the sweeping statement every time.
There is a formal pull too: hyperlinks, fragments and juxtaposition were poetic techniques before they were web architecture, so the medium feels oddly pre-adapted to verse.
Where it comes from
The theme's deepest roots are in poems of overwhelming networks: Whitman's crowds and catalogues, the city poems of the modernists, every attempt to hold too many simultaneous lives in one stanza. When hypertext arrived, experimental poets of the 1990s built branching poems for the new medium, and by the 2010s writers like Patricia Lockwood were rendering the online mind's texture, its speed, irony and sudden grief, in work that crossed between poetry and prose.
The migration of poetry itself is part of the story: verse now finds most of its readers through screens, contests run online, and a sonnet can travel from Nairobi to Nottingham in a morning. Poets writing about the internet are also writing about their own delivery system, which gives the theme a useful self-awareness.
The elements that carry it
- The search box and its half-typed confessions, the era's most honest first-person form.
- The archive that forgets nothing: old photographs, dead friends' pages, arguments preserved like insects in amber.
- Cables, servers and undersea lines, the physical body of the supposedly bodiless, running along ocean floors.
- The comment thread as chorus: many anonymous voices, cruel and kind, arriving at one person's news.
- Connection speed and outage, the sudden silence when the signal drops, and the room that reappears around you.
Techniques that work
- Shrink the subject to one act: one search, one profile visited, one page that no longer loads. The whole sea is in any cup of it.
- Use catalogue and fragment, Whitman's tools, to mimic the feed's abundance, then break the catalogue with one line of stillness.
- Write the physical internet, cables under the Atlantic, a humming warehouse of servers, to give the intangible a body.
- Let a search history or autocomplete sequence structure the poem; found and arranged text is native to this theme.
- Play permanence against loss: what the archive keeps forever beside what it never captured, the voice, the weather, the hand held.
Mistakes to avoid
- Writing the whole internet. Poems about “the digital age” fail where poems about one deleted account succeed; scale kills feeling.
- Technophobia as insight. The internet ruined attention, yes, and also reunited the adopted with their mothers; a poem should be able to hold both.
- Jargon without image: bandwidth and algorithms mean little until they touch a face, a kitchen, a night.
- Forgetting the offline world entirely. The strongest internet poems keep one window open on a real room, so the reader feels the two worlds pulling.
An exercise
Write a poem structured as a search history from one difficult night: eight to twelve searches, in order, no commentary. Revise until the sequence alone tells the story and the last search lands like a final line.
A challenge
Find the oldest trace of yourself that still exists online, or imagine it. Write a poem addressed to that earlier self, in the second person, without using the words internet, online or website.
A prompt to start from
Write a poem about typing a name into a search box and hesitating before pressing enter: whose name, and why tonight?
Before you submit
- The poem's centre is a single act or artefact: a search, a page, an account, a thread.
- Abstract network language is grounded in physical image at least once.
- Both tenderness and unease are allowed on the page.
- The offline world appears and exerts pressure.
- The ending is an action or image, not a thesis about technology.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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