A Typewriter Poem by Clifford Hunt
Clifford Hunt’s poem, “Oh Summer, Look,” comes, he says, “out of my love of short works, old typewriters, and Courier font.” For the last several years, he says, “I have been printing short poems in large Courier and placing them in the old Royal Typewriter that lives on our front porch.” Several of Hunt’s typewriter poems, including this one, have been published in the Half Moon Bay Review (California).
What strikes me about the poems, beyond their beauty, is their kind. If Walter Benjamin were alive and rewriting his famous essay, “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936), in and for our age, the age of electronic reproduction, I have to think he would attach what he so rightly called “the aura” to “Oh Summer, Look,” coming out of the old Royal typewriter on Clifford Hunt’s front porch. — WS