Date: 1965
"The younger machines occupy miles of dark benches, / Enjoying self-induced vacations of the mind, / Eating textbook rinds, spitting culture seeds, / Dreaming an exotic name to give their latest defeat, / Computing the hours on computer minds."
preview | full record— Kaufman, Bob (1925-1986)
Date: 1968
"Like a clock whose hands are sweeping / Past the minutes of its face, / And the world is like an apple / Whirling silently in space, / Like the circles that you find / In the windmills of your mind!"
preview | full record— Bergman, Alan (b. 1925) and Marilyn Bergman [née Keith] (b.1929)
Date: 1968
In one's head is "a button on a control panel. The button is marked 'take the left free end of a shoelace in the left hand'. When depressed, it activates a series of wheels, cogs, levers, and hydraulic mechanisms."
preview | full record— Fodor, Jerry (b. 1935)
Date: 1984
"Case felt as though his brain were jammed."
preview | full record— Gibson, William (b. 1948)
Date: 1984
"Sandstorms raged across the scoured floor of his skull, generating waves of high thin static that broke behind his eyes, spheres of purest crystal, expanding."
preview | full record— Gibson, William (b. 1948)
Date: 1985
"In the dark the mind runs on like a devouring machine, the only thing awake in the universe."
preview | full record— Delillo, Don (b. 1936)
Date: 1986
"But it was only the heart's / racketing flywheel stuttering I want, I want // until exhaustion, until I was a guest in the yoke / of my body by the last margin of land where the river // mingles with the sea & far off daylight whitens, / a rending & yielding I must kneel before, as // bar...
preview | full record— Hull, Lynda (1954-1994)
Date: 1989
"we all rose / every black one of us still alive / and went to meet that man / the same man who had erased our blackboard, crashed our computer heads, / burned our books and cooked our elders in superstitions and trivial / remembrances slave traders called fairytales from when massa was animals"
preview | full record— Kalamu ya Salaam (b. 1947)