Then & Now: WCW on QWERTY

Then:

This is the alphabet q w e r t y u i o p a s d f g h j k l z x c v b n m. The extraordinary thing is that no one has yet taken the trouble to write it out fully.

–William Carlos Williams, “The Simplicity of Disorder” (1929)

Now:

1. qwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnm

A phenomena that happens to a computer’s keyboard when a human being is bored to death…

Bored to death in a cube a human decides to type qwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnm (all the keyboard buttons in an orderly way) to a search engine to see what comes up…

–urbandictionary.com (May 5, 2006)

Ah, those were the days!

Michael Leong's most recent books are Words on Edge, Contested Records: The Turn to Documents in Contemporary North American Poetry, and Sky-Quake: Tremor of Heaven, a co-translation, with Ignacio Infante, of Vicente Huidobro’s operatic long poem. He is Robert P. Hubbard Assistant Professor of Poetry at Kenyon College.

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2 thoughts on “Then & Now: WCW on QWERTY”

This is great. Thank you, Michael.

Thanks, Lily.

If I were in Buffalo, I’d check out The Poetry Collection at UB to see WCW’s “favorite fold-up typewriter”:

http://library.buffalo.edu/pl/collections/williamcarloswilliams.php

Lily says:

July 11, 2010 at 12:59 pm

This is great. Thank you, Michael.

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Michael Leong says:

July 16, 2010 at 9:39 am

Thanks, Lily.

If I were in Buffalo, I’d check out The Poetry Collection at UB to see WCW’s “favorite fold-up typewriter”:

http://library.buffalo.edu/pl/collections/williamcarloswilliams.php

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