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We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done
My poem "The Clock House" is now online at Stone Telling.
I have a hard time writing about this poem; its subjects are dear to me and it took me a year to write. It is for Christopher Morcom, July 13 1911—February 13 1930. It is also for Alan Turing, 23 June 1912—7 June 1954. The reasons are different, but they both should have had more life. I can't give it back to them: memory is all you can give the dead. And not myth, if you can help it. Not tactful forgetting. This year is Turing's centenary; I doubt many people who haven't read Andrew Hodges know Christopher's name. We should not lose any more like them.
This is Stone Telling's queer issue; I think it's the best the magazine has produced so far. You want to read every poem. There's myth, there's astronomy, there's history, there's epic, there's nothing fantastic (but people) going on at all. None of them say quite the same thing.
The fact that a brain can do it seems to suggest that the difficulties may not really be so bad as they now seem.
—Alan Turing, "Can digital computers think?" (1951)
I have a hard time writing about this poem; its subjects are dear to me and it took me a year to write. It is for Christopher Morcom, July 13 1911—February 13 1930. It is also for Alan Turing, 23 June 1912—7 June 1954. The reasons are different, but they both should have had more life. I can't give it back to them: memory is all you can give the dead. And not myth, if you can help it. Not tactful forgetting. This year is Turing's centenary; I doubt many people who haven't read Andrew Hodges know Christopher's name. We should not lose any more like them.
This is Stone Telling's queer issue; I think it's the best the magazine has produced so far. You want to read every poem. There's myth, there's astronomy, there's history, there's epic, there's nothing fantastic (but people) going on at all. None of them say quite the same thing.
The fact that a brain can do it seems to suggest that the difficulties may not really be so bad as they now seem.
—Alan Turing, "Can digital computers think?" (1951)
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Thank you. I mean it. It's not so much that there's a lot of bad poetry about Alan Turing (or any about Christopher Morcom, aside from Geoffrey Hill's "A Cloud in Aquila") as that I really didn't want to start the trend. They have been important to me for years.
Did you hear about the petition to get Turing on the £10 note
No! That's marvelous. I wish I lived in the right country to sign!
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Oh, hell: I'll read it if you will.
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