Typewriters
Forty-four keys, one ribbon, and no delete: write the machine that made words physical.
Quick answer: Learn to write poems about typewriters: imagery, craft techniques, mistakes to avoid, plus exercises and prompts in this free guide by Writory for poets.
What this theme is
Before the cursor there was the carriage. A typewriter poem is a poem about words with weight: each letter a small hammer strike, each mistake permanent or painted over, each finished page pulled from the roller like something baked. The machine made writing loud, muscular and unforgiving, and poems about it inherit that character. You do not tap a typewriter; you play it, fight it, feed it.
The theme now carries a second layer: obsolescence. A typewriter in a poem today is almost always also about time, the office that once clattered like rain, the machine in the attic with a letter still in it, the trade of typist that employed millions of women and then vanished. Writing typewriters means writing what the world sounded like before it went quiet.
Why poets return to it
Poets love the typewriter because it is the rare tool that performs rhythm. Keys, bell, carriage return: the machine writes in percussion, and a poem can borrow that beat directly. It also embodies commitment. On a typewriter every word costs a keystroke you cannot silently undo, and poems about it become meditations on saying things you cannot take back. Few objects offer sound, labour, history and irrevocability in one metal box.
Where it comes from
The typewriter changed literature's look as well as its speed. Don Marquis invented archy the cockroach in 1916, a poet insect who typed free verse by diving headfirst onto the keys and could never manage the shift for capitals, a joke that quietly taught readers how typography carries voice. Later, e. e. cummings made the machine's lowercase and spacing into a style, and the concrete poets arranged typewritten characters into pictures on the page. Charles Bukowski turned the machine itself into a character, the nightly ten-round bout between a man and his keys. The typewriter did not just record poems; it shaped them.
The elements that carry it
- Sound: the clatter, the ding of the bell, the ratchet of the return, the silence when it stops.
- Mechanics: hammers, ribbon, platen, jammed keys, the two-colour switch of black and red.
- The typed page: uneven ink, the letter that always strikes faint, xxxx-ed out words left visible.
- The typist: aching fingers, the pool of women at rows of desks, the writer at 2 a.m. annoying the neighbours.
- Obsolescence: attic machines, ribbon gone dry, the last repair shop in town.
Techniques that work
- Let the machine's percussion drive your metre: short stressed syllables for keystrokes, a long line for the carriage sweep, a stanza break for the bell.
- Keep mistakes visible: strike-throughs and repeated letters on the page can enact what the typewriter never let anyone hide.
- Write the unfinished page: a letter abandoned mid-sentence in the roller is a ready-made mystery with a machine as witness.
- Give the typewriter a working life: whose desk, which years, what it typed, invoices, love letters, dismissals, and let the document list tell the century.
- Play the machine against the screen: one stanza of hammering permanence, one of silent, endlessly revisable glow.
Mistakes to avoid
- Pure nostalgia: sepia light and “they don't make them like this anymore.” Give the machine work to do in the poem, not just dust.
- Ignoring the sound. A silent typewriter poem wastes the theme's best instrument.
- Romanticising the writer at the keys while forgetting the typists, clerks and secretaries who actually lived at these machines.
- Overloading the poem with mechanism. Name two or three parts precisely; a full parts catalogue reads like a manual.
An exercise
Write a ten-line poem in which every line imitates the typewriter physically: build rhythm from short percussive words, end one line with a bell sound, include one visibly struck-out word, and stop mid-sentence where the ribbon runs dry.
A challenge
Find or imagine one typewritten document, a 1962 job application, a wartime telegram draft, an unsent letter, and write its story twice: once in the voice of the person typing, once in the voice of the machine.
A prompt to start from
Write a poem about the last sentence left in a typewriter found in a cleared house, and the stranger who cannot stop reading it.
Before you submit
- At least two sounds of the machine appear, placed where they matter.
- One document with human stakes is named or shown.
- The rhythm of some lines enacts keystrokes or the carriage return.
- Nostalgia, if present, is complicated by work, error or loss.
- Technical terms are few, accurate and doing imagery's job.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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