Technology
From the locomotive to the lock screen, machines have always asked poets what we are becoming.
Quick answer: Learn to write poems about technology: screens and machines as imagery, craft techniques, mistakes, prompts and exercises in this free guide by Writory.
What this theme is
A technology poem is never really about the device. It is about the new gestures, thumb-scroll, swipe, refresh, and what they do to attention, memory and love. The phone on the table during dinner, the map that means no one is ever lost or wandering again, the message read but not answered: these are the theme's real subjects. The machine is just the newest place where human longing shows up wearing different clothes.
The theme also holds a genuine question rather than a settled answer. Technology connects the emigrant daughter to her mother's face across an ocean, and it also lets grief be interrupted by an advert. Poems that hold both truths at once outlast poems that pick a side, because the reader lives in both.
Why poets return to it
Poets take up this theme because it is where the present moment is most visibly different from every past one, and poetry has always been a tool for looking hard at the present. There is also a formal thrill in it: the language of code, error messages and autocorrect offers found textures no previous century had. And because so much technology poetry defaults to easy alarm, a poem with genuine ambivalence stands out immediately.
Where it comes from
Poets have been arguing with machines since the machines arrived. Whitman addressed a steam engine directly in 'To a Locomotive in Winter', calling it a 'fierce-throated beauty' and folding it into his catalogue of American wonders. Emily Dickinson watched the railway 'lap the miles' and 'lick the valleys up' with a cat's playful menace. Hart Crane made Brooklyn Bridge the spine of an entire modern epic, and Stephen Spender found the pylons striding the hills like bare giant girls.
The digital era produced its own poets of the feed. Patricia Lockwood's writing about life inside the internet, and the many recent poems built from search histories, text threads and comment sections, show the newest machines becoming lyric material within a decade of their invention.
The elements that carry it
- Light as the era's signature: screen glow on a face in a dark room, the blue hour of the bedroom at midnight.
- The vocabulary of the interface, notification, buffering, airplane mode, used sparingly as found language.
- Obsolete machines, cassette tapes, dial tones, a drawer of dead chargers, which carry instant elegy.
- Hands and thumbs: the body's negotiations with glass, the phantom vibration in a pocket.
- Signal and silence, full bars against dead zones, the typing indicator that appears and disappears.
Techniques that work
- Write the device as a third presence in a human scene, the phone between two people at a table, and let its glow do what a character would.
- Borrow a digital form: a poem shaped as a text thread, a search history or an error message gains structure and irony at once.
- Anchor the poem in one specific machine with history, a grandmother's radio, a first phone, rather than technology in general.
- Use the gap between message sent and message read as dramatic space; the ellipsis of the typing bubble is a modern volta.
- Set a digital image against an old bodily one within a line or two, satellite and swallow, server farm and hayfield, so the centuries touch.
Mistakes to avoid
- Writing the sermon: 'we are all slaves to our screens'. Alarm without particularity is a headline, not a poem; show one scrolled-past sunset instead.
- Nostalgia as automatic virtue. The past had loneliness too; a poem that remembers waiting by a landline honestly will admit the waiting hurt.
- Stuffing the poem with brand names and slang that will date it within five years; choose the gesture over the product.
- Forgetting the body. A technology poem with no hands, eyes or breath in it becomes a think-piece with line breaks.
An exercise
Open your own recent messages and copy out five fragments, yours or others', with names removed. Arrange them as a found poem, then write one original stanza underneath in which a body does something no phone can record.
A challenge
Write a poem about a piece of technology that is now obsolete, a fax machine, a rented video, a phone box, addressed to someone too young to have used it. Make the machine carry a feeling, not just information.
A prompt to start from
Write a poem about the last photograph on a phone that no one can open anymore.
Before you submit
- One specific machine, with an owner and a history, anchors the poem.
- The body appears: hands, eyes, posture, breath, somewhere among the screens.
- Interface language is used as deliberate texture, not accidental jargon.
- The poem holds ambivalence; it neither worships nor only condemns.
- The ending lands on an image, not a warning about society.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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