For The Paris Review, Nora Claire Miller reminds us of the purpose and whimsical creativity of the screen savers that protected early computer monitors from “burn-in,” a situation in which an image shown on screen for too long would be “tattooed to the pixels,” permanently disfiguring the screen. Miller considers the repetitive and often overlapping pattern of screen savers in analyzing dreamlike poetry by Bianca Rae Messinger.
The article explained that there was a new danger facing computers: “burn-in.” Basically, if a screen showed the same thing for too long, the shadow of its image would be tattooed to the pixels. A screen saver stirs the soup of the image to keep it from sticking to the screen.
The science behind burn-in is grotesque: picture swarms of electrons like locusts flinging themselves at the thin phosphor coating of a screen, chewing holes. A screen saver periodically smokes the locusts out, thereby saving the screen from the disfigurement of monotony.
But the poems talk about memory as though time itself were a screen saver—a series of recurring dreams that overlap.
More picks about poetry
How the Poet Christian Wiman Keeps His Faith
“Pushpin-specific lists fill his essays; single, stirring images lift from lines of his poems like the pages of a pop-up book.”
The Poetry Fan Who Taught an LLM to Read and Write DNA
“By treating DNA as a language, Brian Hie’s ‘ChatGPT for genomes’ could pick up patterns that humans can’t see, accelerating biological design.”
In Defense of Despair
“The feeling is most commonly framed as an end point, a level of despondency that cannot be overcome. But it doesn’t have to be.”
