QWERTY verse

I have long thought – for years – that contemporary poetry analysis should include a physical component: studying the movement of the poet’s hands on the keyboard.

The qwerty keyboard was invented in order to make typing more difficult, so that typewriters (the people) wouldn’t jam up their typewriters (the machines) by typing too quickly. All the most common letters have to be typed with the weaker left hand, and their placement is difficult and inefficient. Punctuation is, for some reason, included on the main part of the board, but numbers aren’t. When you think about it, qwerty is weird.

But everyone got used to the format, and now it’s standard, despite the practical limits of a metal bar striking paper being eliminated.

This strikes me as being a poetic sort of progress. It’s certainly not a practical one.

There have been movements to produce and popularize a more efficient keyboard system, now that we have only screens to worry about, but they seem to fail as badly as the doomed-from-the-start Esperanto. Some people bother to learn it, but most don’t; it seems natural now, this bizarre setup, and making it more efficient seems crass and strange.

I find that I think of my hands differently when I’m typing than when I’m doing anything else. I am typically right-handed, using the left only as a stabilizer or guide, except when I’m typing. Then my left hand becomes familiar and useful. My right hand becomes the outcast, relegated to o and k and j and semicolons. It’s a small but persistent shift in my thinking, and it happens automatically.

And there are times when I find myself typing things out in my head – things I might say in conversation, or the content of signs, or headlines, or quotes I remember – and thinking through the interaction of my two hands, as though they reply to each other through striking different keys. As though they’re talking.

So sometimes, when I read poetry, I imagine what it was like to type out the words, to hit enter, to add and delete and add punctuation, what the poet’s hands were saying. I wonder what effect it has on a poet’s psyche to delete permanently, to remove from a screen rather than strike off of a paper. I wonder how many poets actually use computers to write, and how many fearfully or stubbornly or gratefully stick to plain paper and a pen. I wonder if they consider whether their words are graceful, in terms of the movements they encourage, as well as how they sound read aloud, or how their shapes look on the paper.

Maybe there should be a poetry that is based on the idea of movement, like a dance of writing. It wouldn’t have to make the same kind of sense as a sonnet or a villanelle – it could be mostly about harmony between sounds and appearance and motion. Instead of reading it, we could practice it, treat it like a piano score instead of a book. We could make typing – its strange anachronisms intact, in the midst of practical technological advancement – into a kinetic art.

Or not.

But I think it’s worth some thought.