In the comments section that accompanies my kvetching last Monday about Blogger’s unannounced – and underdocumented – “relaunch” of its service with a spiffier look, but buggier code, two people – David Nemeth and someone named eddie – both asked quite reasonably why I would continue with, as eddie put it, “this crappy free service.” It’s a good question & deserves an answer.

 

When I started this weblog back at the end of August 2002, one of my goals was to explore the possibility of a form that could lead to a wider discussion of contemporary poetry & poetics, especially outside of an academic context. When I began, there were, I am now aware, two already existing serious literary blogs – Joe Duemer’s Reading & Writing and Laura Willey’s Laurable.Com. The blogroll to the left of this note now has some 290 weblogs, over 250 of which belong to practicing poets & their peers. There are post-avants of all stripes, new formalists, neo-beats, cartoon Jimmy & more than a couple of people on that list who think I’m the most painfully pompous person on the planet. But the simple fact that there are over 250 strikes me as a good thing. And it’s worth noting that even the academics among them – some excellent ones too, like Tim Yu, Chris Murray & Kasey Mohammad – produce these blogs not out of any professional advantage it might afford them – if anything, there is some risk to the contrary – but from of a love for the language arts.

 

I’m fortunate in that in as the number of weblog choices available to readers has grown, so has my own blog’s audience – I’m currently getting an average of 350 visits per day, with readers generally looking at 1.5 pages each time. So, while this is not the most widely read literary weblog – Mark Woods’ lot holds that distinction – it gets enough readers to make me realize that its impact, socially, must extend beyond its function nearly two years ago in helping to spark the concept of the literary weblog.

 

And that is what keeps me at Blogger, deficient though it surely is. The fact that it is free & that any teenager could figure out how to use it – and mostly do a better design job than I have, in the process – is precisely its value. This is what I call – and I know I’m not alone – the “Yahoo effect.” Yahoo! succeeded as a web tool & as a company not because it was well designed, but because it was not. It was, as I used to joke back in the days when it was still just some kids at Stanford, the way my mother would organize her way around the web, tho my late grandmother might have been the more apt analogy. In those days, the most proficient & cool search engine was HotBot, powered by Inktomi, which had the first truly advanced search function. The handful of choices that enabled someone to limit their search to one country, one file type, one language, let alone word &/or phrase, made HotBot the favored search tool among geeky types, but it also limited HotBot precisely to those folks. HotBot intimidated people who did not know if they wanted a JPG or PDF file. Google,when it first arrived on the scene, wasn’t any more powerful than HotBot, but it masked the relative complexity of its operations far better.

 

Poetry is an art form that can be conducted with a pencil & a piece of paper, even less if need be.* That is, to my mind at least, one of its primary attractions – indeed, there have been more than a few successful poets who could not have worked in any form that demanded either a greater degree of technical sophistication or the ability to play well with others. If I want to encourage others to take up the idea of talking & writing about contemporary poetry in a context like this one, then it behooves me to do so in the closest thing to the “beginner” software I can find. The not-so-hidden message is this: you could do this too. 

 

And the world will be richer if you do. All these weblogs, especially in their interconnectedness, point to something that is seldom discussed about poetry, but which is nearly as important an element as its technological simplicity – that it functions, at least in the United States, primarily as a community. This has enormous implications theoretically, and I’m up for exploring them all, even the negative ones like the paranoia & backbiting. The positives outweigh the other many times over & it’s a better use of my time (yours too) to think about that.

 

Thus, to pick a not entirely arbitrary example, Matthew Shindell complains that “Ron Silliman still has not told us about his first experience with Mail Art.” It’s not that I’m not paying attention, nor even that most mail art reminds me of Jim Gustafson’s great dictum to aspire to read more than what comes in the mail. It’s a quandary as to how to think about this question. I believe I may have gotten some pieces from Davi Det Hompson back in the 1970s, maybe even the 1960s. But those pieces never dented many of the brain cells, frankly. A more playful piece I got once was a literal poetic license from some Los Angeles performance artists who called themselves, if memory serves, Le Petite Bon Bon. I had that tacked up on the wall for quite awhile.

 

Yet when I really think of what this question must actually mean, underneath all else, two postcards from poets, one very early one from Allen Ginsberg responding to something I’d sent him when I was just literally out of high school, encouraging me but, in response to an allusion in my text to Dexedrine, telling me to cool it on the “dex.” My mother misread Allen’s cramped penmanship & was not at all sure what to make of this admonition to, as she read it, cool it on the “sex.”

 

The second was a post card from Louis Zukofsky circa 1970, after I’d written to propose an Objectivist Casebook that would have combined the Objectivist issue of Poetry with the later Objectivist Anthology, plus some critical material. The card read as follows:

 

No,

 

 

            But,

 

                       

                        Sincerely,

 

 

                                                LZ

 

 

 

 * I recall Abigail Child telling me, way back in the mid-1970s, that once she had sunk an enormous amount of money into an early film, tArgarden, the only art forms she could afford to practice for some time were poetry & dance.