Hartford poet evokes dangers of technology
Brett A. Maddux is 35 years old. While most people his age are focusing on building their resumes and saving money, Maddux isn’t interested in any of that.
He has had prestigious jobs — special assistant to U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy — and more mainstream jobs, an administrative position at Connecticut Children’s Medical Center.
But for him, work is a way to make money for a while so he can quit for a while, meditate, walk in nature, spend time with friends and write poetry.
“Being in an office is an unusual way to spend your time. If you were conscripted, you’d feel like you’re in prison. But if you’re paid, you call it a job,” Maddux said in a recent interview in Hartford. “And you wait until the end of your life to retire.”
Currently, Maddux is happily unemployed. He lives on Maple Avenue in Hartford in an apartment with no TV, radio or internet, few possessions and limited social contact. He is happy about that, too. The lack of distraction gives him time to read a lot, think a long time about things and write what comes into his mind.
His latest collection of poems, “Maple,” is formed by that lack of distraction. In his writing, Maddux calls attention to algorithms that box people in, mentally intrusive advertising, online echo chambers that pit bubbles against each other, as well as the powers-that-be who want people distracted, compliant and compartmentalized.
“hey kids, i’ve checked with these adults & it seems they don’t know anything though they try to tell you otherwise & they love to sell your data as they want to make you hate yourself, as they’ve fear & shiny objects that it pays for them to sell you, i guess they’re hoping you’ll be miserable to stay addicted to the product.”
Maddux said the internet “is like a drug.”
“Everyone is addicted to the
same drug so they don’t see it that way. It’s like heroin. I stopped using it. I’m out. I’m free.”
Maddux will do a reading from “Maple” and a previous collection, “Algorithm Hymns,” on March 3 at 7 p.m. at The Caf, 231 Trumbull St. in Hartford.
Then he will travel for a while, doing readings around the country. And reading books, walking in nature, hanging around with friends. And not missing social media even a little bit.
“The internet causes you to be angry all the time. It narrows your world down to an algorithm set. You live in a calcified bubble of your own design,” he said. “And there is an alternate reality, people who believe the opposite of what you believe. So you point at each other and fight. They outrage you by design.”
He added: “We are told that technology is an unmitigated good. I am skeptical of that.”
Many poems in “Maple” demonstrate the anger and mystification of living in a world dominated by manufactured thinking and profit-driven manipulation, “scam industries & their conglomerates, investment banker middle managers, junkies, data mercenaries & advertisers, hedge fund presses & billionaire papers.”
Other times he has fun with these themes, with passages like hip-hop lyrics: “all these bankers and their ponzi schemes, all these tanks filled up with gasoline, all these brains that swim in dopamine, all these heads free-basing ketamine, all these monkeys & their cell-phone screens, all these kids are taking nicotine.”
Hovering over many poems are three quotes: “The distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion” by Albert Einstein; “Standing on the bare ground — my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space — all mean egotism vanishes” by Ralph Waldo Emerson; and “Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices” from Shakespeare’s “The Tempest.” Maddux quotes them frequently to augment his observations on the same themes.
Maddux also populates his observations with alley cats and barking dogs (“when I hear them, I know it’s time to write,” he said) and blackbirds. This is not a nod to Hartford poet Wallace Stevens, but a symbol of reincarnation. “In Hartford, blackbirds always come back at the same time. Every time they’re there is a reincarnation,” he said.
Some subjects are grim, such as nuclear weaponry. Others merely observe life: two poems are “all of my friends are having children” and “first it is one year & then it is another one.”
Being a longtime Hartford resident — transplanted from his hometown of Iowa City — Maddux mentions the capital city a few times, even getting in a dig at The Courant: “the hartford paper, owned by venture capitalists who sold it off for parts, has a front-page headline: war: good for local economy.”
In his next literary move — after doing readings for “Maple” — Maddux will leave the real world behind and write a sci-fi novel set 100 years in the future, called “The Black Hole at the Bottom of the Ocean.” He also plans to write a book of short stories.
Or, to be more precise, he will let those books be written. “My perception is that I didn’t write any of these poems. I listened and they were told to me,” he said.
His goal in all of his writing, though, is to say what he knows and hopes he makes a difference. As he phrases it in one poem:
“i am here to bear my witness & try at last to serve some purpose, with the time i have been given.”