I want to dream out words of anger / on this machine that states my mind
Ursula K. Le Guin wrote this poem on a word processor, or so we must presume. We don’t know exactly when, but it’s published (for the first time) in a 1994 collection called Going Out with Peacocks.
Of course it’s not really about word processing. Or is it? The republic of letters gives way to the war machine (which gave rise to the computer), and words themselves become processed as they are repeated and milled by the twelve short lines of the poem.
The ending, in particular, is scarily prescient these days:
The kind republic that we dreamed /
of building falls to night.
I don’t know very much else about Le Guin’s computing history. In Track Changes, I included the detail that she was not writing with a word processor as late as 1985, when she finished Always Coming Home; but she comments in a 2008 interview with Carl Freedman that she was:
… aware even back then that the computer might
encourage certain complex movements of narrative—recursions, implications to be
followed, forking paths, etc.—that were very much in my head as I wrote the
book.
