Credit card poetry

New (old) technology from Mastercard means that your credit card has become a mini-computer with input and output messages on the card. The display is very limited currently and if you are as old as the hills will remind you of digital calculators in the seventies.

p&g wonders if this couldn't be adapted for poetry requirements - a tweet poetry length display direct to you...maybe a mini mini keyboard too.

Check out the well-cool Mastercard youtube vid here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRfjn1wNcIU

Call for poetry, reviews and essays...

Call for poetry (no more than 120 lines), images and reviews (literary and technical) for Issue 1 due Spring 2011. Deadline for copy is March 30th 2011.

Essays, by prior discussion with the Editor only, send an outline of your ideas marked FAO Bridget Khursheed. Please note that editorial policy values the experimental, fresh and thoughtful in language and form; don't send us an ode to your i-pod. Having said that we love poets who surprise us with their use of traditional form and welcome dialect poems and translations.

Contact for submissions and all other enquiries is poetandgeek at gmail.com.

Computer works 01: Diana Syder's String

Diana Syder is a poet and artist and her book String (Smith/Doorstop Books 2007) is still a rare thing. The result of a residency in Electronic and Electrical Engineering at the University of Sheffield, funded by an award from the Leverhulme Trust.

Coming from a programming background, we might define string as, a sequence of characters (a data type storing a sequence of data values) and this book contains a poem on Boolean logic. Just the fact of that is enough to delight a programmer! Boole's inspiration is also the poet's


If a great idea is a pin of light
or a highlight placed carefully in the pupil,
it makes of our heads some racing,
slight-rigged thing with sails skin-tight....


and is much more pleasing to think of
than molecules hauling luke-warm cargoes
through plasma in the sticky dark;
noradrenalin, acetylcholine, gamma aminobutyric acid -
even their names are supertankers
that cannot manoeuvre quickly.


Boolean logic Diana Syder


Having spent a lot of time whipping cards in and out of computers, the observational poem Look Inside a Computer is less evocative for me.

But of course this is not the only card up Syder's sleeve, her string is superstring theory - the idea that the smallest entities in the universe are made up of strings (rather than points) which vibrate at resonant frequencies. And to simplify, differently scaled resonance would effect a variety of fundamental forces. This idea would imply the existence of perhaps up to ten dimensions to work theoretically.

These poems inspire a real Donne-like excitement at the world of computing and physics; still recommended. Look forward to pointing out a few more informatic-informed works in the future...





String, Smith/Doorstop Books £7.95 available from: Smith/Doorstop Books, Bank St., Arts, 32-40 Bank St, Sheffield S1 2DS or Amazon etc.