“Today’s New Fingers” by Nick Heitmann

Seeing that poem number 7 needed to be a poem that tested our personification skills, I thought Nick did a skillful job at completing this.  The poem’s title, “Today’s New Fingers” follows the poem’s context of what appears to be a personified electronic keyboard for a computer.  I thought this was especially interesting because our class poems needed to be typed up and found this poem to be a nice reflection of the authors ability to incorporate the relevant use of a computer(It makes me wish I had wrote a personification poem about writing a poem).  The poem’s speaker is the lifelike persona given to the keyboard which carries a dismissive and meloncholy tone which seem appropriate for an electronic device that gets used and taken for granted many times per day(especially the ones at the library).  This tone can be seen in lines like, “I know your fingers feel at home/Just as I feel completely alone” and “I’ll never be able to see/The words that you type beyond my structure”.  The poem carries a sad undecurrent while Nick did a nice job of allowing the poem’s audience to truly picture what it would feel like to “trapped” in the mindset of a inanimate keyboard.  The keyboard encounters the joy of meeting many new users all the time, but sadly it cannot see what is actually being typed.  The poem also has an interesting ryhme scheme where there is an abab rhybe pattern for only a few specific lines.  I felt that this was specifically intended for an added effect that sheds more light on what it would feel like to be a keyboard as these rhyming lines seemed deeper to me.  The use of a semicolon after in the line, “The words that you type beyond my structure;” was a nice punctuational tool that brought more emotion to the surface while also physically including a “structure” at the end of the line.  The only thing I would change about your poem is perhaps creating more tension within the context.