I discovered Dana Levin’s 2014 poem, “Banana Palace,” a few weeks ago, got her collection of the same name from the Austin Public Library, and have read it many times ever since. Prompted by this image (which I had to look up immediately after reading the poem),
Levin writes a by turns moving, frightening, and uncannily funny poem about how she will explain our hermetically sealed Internet browsing and image and identity trading to a future population scraping by, certainly without the Internet and probably without much else, after nuclear war or environmental collapse. Here’s the opening:
It gets even better after that! It’s definitely the best poem about the Internet I’ve ever read, and it was a perfect poem to discover while I was on my social media vacation: “Information about information was the pollen we deposited — while in the real fields bees starved.” (I’m also a sucker for anything about societal breakdown—ask me about the Late Bronze Age Collapse!)
I found the poem through the Poetry Foundation’s Poem of the Day email. Read it and enter the Banana Palace yourself, at your own risk.