Lawnmower Poetry and the Poetry of Lawnmowers

Abstract

The microgenre of lawnmower poetry explores the lawnmower’s capacity both to bore and to endlessly suggest. It modifies genres such as the pastoral and the georgic, tackles themes such as violence, childhood, mortality, masculinity, and the ‘quotidian’, juggles classical and biblical contexts, and negotiates binaries such as man and machine, nature and machine, the country and the city (or, more specifically and ambiguously, the country and the suburb), agency and determinism, destruction and preservation, conflict and harmony. This article will explore a representatively diverse sample of lawnmower poetry through the lens of technography, a theoretical approach clustered around the Open Humanities Press series edited by Steven Connor, David Trotter, and James Purdon. Previous topics of research have ranged from ticker tape to slot machines; this article puts lawnmowers on the technographic map, offering a further focused study of a particular machine.