To everything there is a season – a line I hear in my head invariably in the voice of my inner Pete Seeger. Having done the weblog now for just under 16 months, there is a predictable pattern to any given week. Monday almost invariably is the day in which readership spikes. For one thing, everyone who uses systems only at their jobs or school is back from wherever they flee to on the weekends. For a second (& not co-incidentally), Monday morning is when I send out a list of recent posts to various listservs. Tuesday and Wednesday typically show a slight, but not dramatic drop from Monday. But Thursday & Friday almost always show a substantial decline, especially if Wednesday has been “strong.” Readership on the weekends is about 60 percent of Monday. So when I tell people that my readership seems to have stabilized at around 280 visitors per day, that’s an average that typically includes a Monday somewhere around or above 350 and weekend visitations that are lucky to reach 400 for the two days combined. Further, readers have been remarkably consistent since the blog began in visiting 1.5 pages per trip – a number I usually interpret to mean that a substantial portion of the readers here don’t really visit once every two weeks – the number of days you’ll find posted on this top page.

 

So when, last Thursday, this blog received 517 visits from folks who viewed a total of 945 pages – both records – I could tell that people were checking to see if I was indeed the dragon portrayed in some of the letters to the Poetics List last week, or in fact just a miscast windmill (I prefer the later interpretation myself). The higher than usual ratio of pages visited to visits reinforced that impression – folks were returning to the scene of the original crime to check for fingerprints or, perhaps more pertinently, any sign of a victim.

 

No one listens to poetry, Jack Spicer wrote, but they sure do love to read poetics as Bruce Andrews once amended that for me in conversation, explaining the popularity of the journal he co-edited with Charles Bernstein, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E. And, even in these rarified aesthetic climes, they love a good controversy. For all of the complaints about mud wrestling betwixt poets, nothing draws rubberneckers like a good pile-up on the far side of the road. That kind of attention to a dust-up like the one on Poetics this week reminds me that, when Alan Soldofsky coined the term “language poetry” in Poetry Flash back in ’79, the reason he was asked by Steve Abbott to write the lead article for its special issue on this “new thing” wasn’t because he had some unique insight into the phenomenon – indeed, he had no discernible insight at all – but because Abbott knew that Soldofsky would in fact create some controversy & Steve, always editing Poetry Flash with at least one eye towards that publication’s survival, knew that controversy would draw circulation, which in turn would drive advertising. Out of such considerations are movements not born, but at least named.

 

I received several supportive & wonderful emails from folks this week – and I appreciate every single one of them. And the nicest of them of all is worth noting because it came from Leslie Scalapino.