A future of old poems

I've been reading Montale. There's a real oldness to him, like seeing one of the great cars of the 1950's and thinking how great it must have been to drive one of them, a 1955 Lincoln Capri, without worrying about  destroying the planet.

Maybe one morning, walking in air of dry glass,

I'll turn and see the miracle occur--

nothingness at my shoulders, the void

behind me--with a drunkard's terror.

Then, as on a screen, the usual illusion:

hills houses trees will suddenly reassemble,

but too late, and I'll quietly go my way,

with my secret, among men who don't look back.

                              from "Cuttlefish Bones", Eugenio Montale (Norton, 1992, translated by William Arrowsmith)

When S. said she'd seen a movie about Sam Shepard and 'boy, do you look like him', I didn't know what to say. So I looked in the mirror without really knowing what Sam Shepard looks like. I tried to conjure Sam Shepard but couldn't, and so I just looked like me. I was kind of old, older than I'd like to be, but hadn't yet found the face Auden found near the end of his life in which every line and crease had a carton of Pall Mall cigarettes and a bottle of good whisky tucked inside.

I'm trying so hard to be modern--use portable hand held devices, share files, download--but it's taking a toll. There's something sinister in the medium that isn't there when I use a pen and a piece of paper. A typewriter seems so innocent now, so ancient. When I look down at the trashcan beside my desk and see the crumpled up balls of white paper, in which the flames of possible poems smolder and then burn themselves alive, I see myself as continuing a tradition that has no future.