Sometime today, this blog will greet its 10,000^th visitor. For a genre like poetry in which a turnout of 50 people to a reading is considered a smashing success, this seems remarkable.

2002 will be remembered as the Year of the Blog because, if for no other reason, political bloggers (especially Josh Marshall) were the ones who first noticed & broadcast Trent Lott’s outrageous comments at Strom Thurmond’s birthday party, which led ultimately to his resignation as President of the Senate. As the blogging phenomenon expands to a point where there are now just under one million blogs worldwide – three other members of my own extended family have blogs – it makes sense that some will focus on poetry & poetics.

When I started at the very end of August, there were relatively few weblogs with any sort of announced focus around poetry, most notably Brian Kim Stefans' Free Space Comix & Laurable’s weblog portion of her web site devoted to recordings of poetry readings. Blogs such as those belonging to Brandon Barr & Jill Walker had a relationship to writing, but – like many early blogs – were primarily extensions of an interest in electronic media per se: blog theory.

Since September, quite a number of poetry-centric blogs have started up, some of them really excellent. Here is a list of the blogs that I check at the very least a few times each week.

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>Elsewhere (Gary Sullivan)

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>Equanimity (Jordan Davis)

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>Free Space Comix: The Blog (Brian Kim Stefans)

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>Jill/Txt (Jill Walker)

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>Jonathan Mayhew’s Blog

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>Laurable.Com

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>Lester’s Flogspot (Patrick Herron’s poetry sock puppet)

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>Lime Tree (K. Silem Mohammad)

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>Texturl (Brandon Barr)

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>The Tijuana Bible of Poetics (Heriberto Yepez)

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>Ululations (Nada Gordon)

Blogging has even become slightly controversial on the Poetics List. Some people there seem to think that critical discourse has to follow an either/or model of communication, whereas it seems to me quite obvious to a both/and system in much the same way that both the poetry reading and the poetry book have concrete value for poetry. Blogging seems no more of a threat to listserv discussions than it does to the academy itself.

The blog as diary seems to me of little interest. But blogging as a form of intellectual discipline has great value. I’ve thought more concretely than I otherwise could have about any number of issues over the past four months as a result of this blog. I’ve increased my own reading, and gone in some directions that I would not have otherwise taken. There are some poets whose work I might only have glanced at – Joseph Massey & Richard Deming, for example – without the discipline of the blog. And others whose contributions I might not have thought through nearly as thoroughly as I have – George Stanley, for instance, or Jennifer Moxley. Many of the emails & other communications I’ve received as a result of various blogs have been enormously instructive.

These thoughts occur to me as 2003 approaches concerning blogging and poetry:

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>The number of poetry-centered blogs can only grow and, as it does, the audience for any given approach to such blogs will be forced, simply by the limits of time & attention, to divide. Thus are tendencies born. It will be interesting to see what the terrain looks like one year from now.

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>To date, most if not all poetry-related blogs have come out of the broad spectrum of post-avant literary traditions. This may be because such writing has a critical tradition that is not only an adjunct of the process of tenure.

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>One visible gap to date with regards to poetry blogs appears to be that very old one: gender. Of the eleven blogs listed above, nine are by men. I don’t see any inherent reasons for this gap, although I wouldn’t want to underestimate the number and kinds of distractions & responsibilities with which women in today’s society must contend. But the form itself would seem to have several real advantages that might prove attractive to women, the ability to bypass male editors being only one.