Tim Yu credits Stephanie Young for posing a question about my blogging style: that in choosing the miniature essay form rather than, say, the pseudo-chat room blip, I’m involved in a curious (implying, I suppose, nefarious) “centering” aesthetic move. I.e., by making coherent arguments – to the extent that I do – I push poetry in the direction I want, as distinct from either the direction somebody else might see or want or even just the directionless evolution of that ever infinite number of monkeys at an infinite number of keyboards.

 

Guilty as charged on the point of being deliberate in choosing a style that allows me to develop more of an argument. When I first encountered blogging a little over a year ago, the diary snippet aspect of the weblog put me off. But then my nephew, Daniel, who I think shares in the family trait of utter seriousness, started using an adjunct to his primary blog to post some of his college papers. That set my inner carillon off. It was that aspect of his blog that, as I mulled the question over on Brier Island last summer, set me to thinking.

 

If there’s a distinction between what I’m doing & the “average blog,” at least with regards to poetry, it’s not that my pieces are “centering” & others are not, but rather that mine are conscious that this function is inherent in the act of articulation, that I’m interested in exploring it, where I think some (not all) others seem more ambivalent, sometimes even embarrassed at the notion. By inherent, I mean that the immanence in any address registers exactly that, the presence of a point of view as a point. From the perspective of any writer, the act of writing / speaking / thinking invariably is one of organizing the world around that point, articulating proximities & distances – as I noted Monday, a cartography of poetics. From the perspective of the reader, the challenge is really no different. One navigates between the blogs of various poets much in the same way one does between poems or books. What totalitarians invariably forget (or pretend not to notice) is that these points differ for every individual. The world of literature is not a pyramid at whose pinnacle sits the mind of Harold Bloom, but rather an ever-changing sea of constantly moving relationships. Navigation is exactly, and only, that.