Computer (Deep) Blue: Crafting the Moore’s Law Poem Poetic Form

Acceleration. I’ve been thinking quite a lot about acceleration. My third poetry book, Hivestruck, began as an art project meant to help me process my conflicted feelings about being what Zadie Smith calls (in her essay “Generation Why?”) a “Person 1.0.” Persons 1.0 are simply those humans born before the moment when the internet, virtual reality, and the cell phone became ubiquitous. 

(Do AIs Dream of Electric Deeps?)

We, the last generation of Persons 1.0 are old enough to remember a time when public pay phones still existed and the only screen in our lives was the hefty tube television in the family room that could pick up only four channels and stopped broadcasting every night. But we are also young enough to now be fully entrenched in the network of smartphones and satellites, URLs and drone technology. 

For us, this paradigm shift seemed to occur virtually overnight. We are, as Erykah Badu sang it, an “analog girl in a digital world,” born during a startling volta in the epic poem that is human history. This poetic turn, the birth of the technocracy (which Neil Postman categorizes as the age when technology ceased being merely a tool for human survival and became instead the religious object of worship by humans), induced a kind of vertigo in many of us. 

My own reaction to this feeling was one of rebellion and resistance. I have fluctuated between hostile rejection of the technopoly (by waiting until 2021 to purchase a cell phone) and taking up a hacker’s commitment to adopting the technology for liberatory purposes in my classroom and my art. Writing Hivestruck helped me to better understand these ambivalent feelings about the technopoly, and the dizzying effect it was having on me.

The work of the book led me to understand that I was reacting in part to the extreme velocity with which things have been changing, to Acceleration. Our origins as humans go back approximately 6 million years, but we have only existed in our current form, homo sapiens, for about 300,000 years. 

Writers such as Arthur C. Clarke have theorized that our creation of technology was central to our having survived this long, but for the vast amount of that time our major technological advances were common tools like the spear, shovel, and wheel. The first telephone only happened 150 years ago, the first radio broadcast in 1901, the first commercial flight in 1914. Sputnik 1, the first satellite, launched in 1957, the year my mother was born. Since the Industrial Age, less than 300 years ago, the development of technology has sped up exponentially, and our pace of life has accelerated proportionally to that progress. When things speed up, momentum builds, as does friction. The friction compresses things, melds them. 

As Octavio Paz put it, “such acceleration produces fusion.” Fusion blooms both progress and confusion. Hivestruck is an attempt to make material, through language, this synthesis of progress and confusion.

When it became evident that acceleration would be one of the book’s overarching themes, I determined that the poems in the book should invoke the sensations of quickening and fusion, of innovation wrestling with bewilderment. I needed a poetic form that would not just “say” these things, but also exude them. I found no existing form that would be able to do this work, so I ended up having to create one, a form I call the Moore’s Law Poem. It was a long slow process to come to this form, a process that compelled me to understand the book’s form and function.

In her poetics essay, “You Are Not Safe in Science; You Are Not Safe in History,” Natasha Tretheway examines the meaning and impact of abiding metaphors and how they shape our lives and work. Abiding metaphors can be understood two ways. They are at once symbols and images that recur and manifest continuously with variations throughout our lives that shape our psyches and help us to make meaning. But abiding metaphors can also be symbols and images that litter the culture we are born into, with the intention of limiting our imaginary. 

For Tretheway, a mixed-race poet whose parents birthed her in a time and place when mixing was still very much prohibited, these metaphors came in the form of confederate iconography that was—and is—prominent in the South. These were the metaphors built to contain her in a limiting imaginary. The abiding metaphors she used to make her own meaning, though, came from her more personal family history: an image she recalls from when she nearly drowned as a child, and a photograph her father took of her where she is sitting on a mule.

For a city bred third-gen Nuyorican like me, the abiding metaphors that have shaped me are quite different. Throughout my first two books, which are about my Puerto Rican identity and Caribbean/Latinx history, the island became an abiding metaphor from which I crafted my art (and my psychology). However, working on Hivestruck, a new abiding metaphor arose: the microchip. 

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Made from the second most common element on the Earth’s crust, silicon, and looking like a pixelated spider, its limbs branch out and link to form a sinuous network, an invisible web. The microchip has served as much more than just the dendrites in the brain of all electronic devices that propel modern life on large swaths of the planet. It is also a mutating and multivalent symbol of that life. Whereas Tretheway’s youth was awash in images of confederate flags and civil war statues, mine was inundated with commercials for the Commodore 64, the pixelated Pac Man icon, NASA rocket launches, and mountains of compact discs with the AOL logo.

This abiding metaphor for the book also became an invented poetic form after I learned about Moore’s Law during my research. In 1965, engineer Gordon Moore theorized that the number of chips that could fit into an integrated circuit would double in size every year (after 10 years, he adjusted this prediction to doubling every two years), thus computer processors would get smaller and faster at an exponential rate. This theory came to be known as Moore’s Law, and though it is not in fact a scientific “law,” there is a kind of truth to this prediction. The most powerful computers of the 1970s could fit into a large room. A modern smartphone—faster and more powerful than those computers of 50 years ago—can fit into your hand.

(100+ Poetic Forms for Poets.)

Moore’s Law symbolized for me the acceleration that I was trying to fathom in the book, so I began to play with the foundational elements of Moore’s law and convert them into poetic qualities that might capture the sensations of shrinkage and acceleration. The central constraint of the Moore’s Law form was devised so that the poem would get twice as small with each subsequent stanza, either by line, word, or syllable length at a consistent rate of every one or two stanzas. 

For my Cybermujeres poems, I used word count as the basic unit of constraint, with every stanza being half as many words as the stanza before it, until the final stanza consists of a single word. The Moore’s Law micro-epic Milagros Dreams of Cybersyn uses this compression method as well, but with line length as the basic unit, so that each subsequent stanza has half as many lines as the preceding stanza, culminating in a final stanza of a single line.

A few other less tangible characteristics of the Moore’s Law Poem arose while composing them. The first is thematic. As the haiku is known not only for its rigid syllabic structure, but also commonly refers to nature or uses nature as a thematic element, the Moore’s Law poem conversely (and perhaps obviously) might reference technology, computers, robots, or outer space. Secondly, while a haibun concludes with a haiku that functions as a kind of revelatory moment or condensed reiteration of its prose section, the Moore’s Law poem’s final stanza/line/word serves as a lyrical crescendo that captures the essence of the poem in microcosm. 

In keeping with my own Latinx/Brown poetics, I also drew from the architectural principles of the Latin American décima, which establishes an 8-syllable line format, but also permits the composer to write a line with 7 or 9 syllables. I created the Moore’s Law poem form to offer similar flexibility for the poet to “break” or disrupt the form, as so many innovations and breakthroughs have been born from small rebellions against prior structures as well as from astonishing accidents. 

So, when writing your own Moore’s Law poem, please feel free to shrink your stanzas in half either by every stanza or every two stanzas, and to rebel a little by disrupting your own number or line count. 

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