Yar's Revenge
Published in Poem Of The Day
for Graham Foust
What is technology if not
a kind of built-in nostalgia
for the frantic past's long slide
into a slower present
Put another way: a decade
bends 8-bit bells & whistles
into an oxymoron it nearly
hurts remembering
tight lump on your thigh
of quarters in those short
short shorts. It was amazing
when we could bring it home
Now, it's amazing when we can't
About this poem
"'Yar's Revenge' is a video game, one of the first designed for play on a home console rather than those that were normally just adapted versions of the same games one would find in pizza parlors and arcades nationwide in the early 1980s. As a kid, I remember my pocket weighed down with quarters, which we'd feed one after the other into video game machines. As an adult, my smartphone takes up just about the same amount of space. I think this poem knows that you can't always get what you want, until you can, and then don't want it anymore."
-Noah Eli Gordon
About Noah Eli Gordon
Noah Eli Gordon is the author of "The Word Kingdom in the Word Kingdom" (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2015). He teaches at the University of Colorado-Boulder and lives in Denver.
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The Academy of American Poets is a nonprofit, mission-driven organization, whose aim is to make poetry available to a wider audience. Email The Academy at poem-a-day[at]poets.org.
(c) 2015 Noah Eli Gordon. Originally published by the Academy of American Poets, www.poets.org. Distributed by King Features Syndicate
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