If there is a single comprehensive list of links to post-avant poetry bloggers, I haven’t found it. The one that Gary Sullivan has on his blog site is as good as any:

 

Brandon Barr
Jim Behrle
Caterina
Josh Corey
Cori
Jordan Davis
Alan de Niro
Joseph Duemer
John Erhardt
Ryan Fitzpatrick
Drew Gardner
Jean Gier
Nada Gordon
Daphne Gottlieb
Henry Gould
Gabriel Gudding
Kali Gura
David Henry
David Hess
Jack Kimball
Anastasios Kozaitis
Laurable
Lester
Judy MacDonald
Mainstream Poetry
Joseph Massey
Jonathan Mayhew
Andrew Mister
Kasey Silem Mohammad
Hugh Nicoll
9for9
Erin Noteboom
Katherine Parrish
Nick Piombino
Angela Rawlings
Ron Silliman
Sandra Simonds
Robert Stanton
Brian Kim Stefans
Gary Sullivan
Eileen Tabios
Jill Walker
Heriberto Yepez
Stephanie Young
Tim Yu
Komnino Zervos

 

 

I’ve updated Jim Behrle’s URL in the above. Jim changes his web address as often as some folks change their trousers. I also switched the link for Heriberto Yepez away from the defunct Tijuana Bible of Poetics to his bilingual Border Blogger2. Except that when I typed in the URL from memory, I omitted the “h” that goes before yepez.blogspot.com, which then took me serendipitously to yet another bilingual Tijuana poet, Raul Yepez, who has his links carefully organized by geographic region of Mexico.

 

Technorati makes it possible for someone to see just who has created links to a particular web page. While a number of the links to my blog come predictably from the same list Gary compiled above, others originate from outside that circle, some of them from way outside that circle. Here are some examples:

 

• 2BlowHards: “two graying eternal amateurs discuss their passions, interests and obsessions, among them: movies, art, politics, evolutionary biology, taxes, writing, computers, these kids these days, and lousy Ivy educations.” Michael & Friedrich seem more thoughtful than blowhards, though they are fairly conservative – they’re currently interviewing mathematician & architecture critic Nikos Salingaros, a man who argues that Prince Charles is a major figure in architecture.
• Gideon Strauss: “worldview revivalism, neocalvinist unapologetics, & zeitgeist surfing.” What I know about Gideon is that he appears to be a friend of my nephew Daniel. As Jonathan Mayhew, I think it was, noted about Daniel, we don’t share the same politics or religion. The same holds with regards to Gideon.
• This Writing Life: a blog by playwright, novelist, screenwriter & teacher Charles Deemer. This very much the view of a “working writer.” Deemer & I were obviously in Berkeley during the same years & know some people in common (Gary Gach!), but I’m not sure we’ve ever met.
• Rational Parenting: which is exactly what it sounds like. I like their ideas about taking coercion out of parenting, but I’m not certain why my blog (or Mike Snider’s formalist blog) should show up in their blogroll.
• Odd Things in Pitt’s Libraries: This at least sounds like me. Like Rational Parenting, this site is just what it says it is. One unexpected benefit, however, is that it has some good links to baseball blogs (I am to baseball what Gary Sullivan is to Bollywood).
• Hiving: a website from Bay Area poet Jean Chu. It’s good to see other poets with different aesthetics starting to show up as bloggers.
• The Wily Filipino: Sunny Vergara’s site. He is an anthropology & Asian American studies professor at San Francisco State, the author of Displaying Filipinos.
• Twists and Turns: a site by Michael Gates, free-lance business writer & editor, as well as a creative one. I wonder if Gates looks as much like Michael J. Fox in person as he does in that photo.
• Assorted Grotesqueries: a lit-crit site by Daniel Sendecki. In spite of the title, it is the most elegantly designed site on this entire list. Sendecki also has a pretty decent idea about contemporary poetry – it’s rare to find somebody who can discuss Stephen Greenblatt and Steve McCaffery.
• Raccoon: Notes and Scavengings: Jeremy Bushnell is into all things post-avant, from photocopier art to La Monte Young’s music. Bushnell is writing a serialized web novel – i.e., a novel more or less in blog form.
• Drunken Phone Calls: truth in advertising.
• We Write to Taste Life Twice: a blog of poetry by Crystal Lyn, who copyrights her work as “CLK,” but I don’t know what the K represents.
• Black Spring: a collective website focusing on poetry & poetics. If I’m 1/10^th of the poet this site claims I am, then I would be a very good poet indeed. The one participant I recognize is Steve Tills, whom I still think of as a Sonoma County poet, even though he now lives roughly 2,800 miles east of there.
• Edits: a brand new poetry site by someone who posts as “Nashi.” Cf:

Climates facilitate ennui.

Here and here and herer.

• Singing the Bite Me Song: Miasma is a grassroots journalist.
• Diabetes Sucks: This is a poem / post-avant writing site that I think belongs to Don Cheney, a SoCal legend. There is a piece up there now called “Ron Silliman Bang.” I’m sure they mean it in a nice way.
• Kelele: Actually one of my first links & I still don’t know who the mysterious U. Kelele is. In spite of that Hawai’in reference, we are told that Kelele is KiSwahili for shout. I would not be surprised if this blogger doesn’t go by the nickname Maz from time to time, but I can’t prove it.
• Stockpile: basically a links site from Melissa Hardie. I was the first link.
• Intelligent Worlds: a site about pretty much everything from Benjamin Seeberger, “a senior in university, in Chicago, IL.”

 

No doubt many of these blogs will eventually find their way into that first list above. Over the weekend, I saw Assorted Grotesqueries on Nick Piombino’s blogroll & the Wily Filipino on Tim Yu’s. Then Kasey Mohammad had them both, plus some other links I’d not seen before.