A scrunched, fa ding bookmark fell from a book. It was a cutting, a newspaper poem by Judith Wright entitled “Computers”. ‘Those things make me nervous/ but not for the reasons you think,’ she begins, setting up the dichotomy that our ways are not a poet’s ways. Notice her connection of ‘things’ with ‘think’. ‘Not because they’ll take away our living;/ if we really liked living/ that wouldn’t matter,/we could start living instead. You don’t need much money to live.’ She raises this matter of ‘living’, which is about the most important subject in the world, more important than computers. Notice how she introduces money from nowhere. She seems to be making a link between computers and money, one that today has become profound. Living, for Judith, is about creating, if we are to understand the next verse aright: ‘Not because they’ll write poems or paint pictures;/ no one who knows what poetry is/ or what pictures are/ could do more than laugh at that one.’ This is a confident assert...