First, I was catching up on my reading in The Nation, that progressive publication that has barely updated either its format or its poetics since it first came out in the Lincoln administration. Back in early June – you can tell I’m a month behind (more really, when you think of how The Nation forward dates its issues – the current issue is August 2) – it ran an article by Scott Sherman on “The Rebirth of the NYRB.” Can the rebirth of the San Francisco Call-Bulletin be far behind?

Then Jim Bennett, who has taken over the late Ted Slade’s duties at Poetry Kit, emailed me to ask what my thoughts on blogging per se might be. And then Laura Sells’ blog turned me onto Into the Blogosphere, an attempt at a coordinated academic study of blogging per se. And, for good measure, Sells’ blog links also to an article on blogging in The Chronicle of Higher Education. All of which sets my fevered brow in the general direction of the rolls played by writing, media, intellectuals & society, not necessarily in that order.

The silliest of these pieces is – drum roll please – Sherman’s piece in The Nation, largely because of the breathless deference accorded NYRB’s willingness to sic Norman Mailer on Donny Rumsfeld et al. In Sherman’s view, NYRB is the notable exception to the journals of public intellectuals that gradually (or not so gradually) shifted from the left to the right, as a series of old Trots gave rise to the first wave of Neocons. Yet the New York Review of Books is hardly a peer to the likes of The Partisan Review or Commentary. Founded in 1963 (29 years after Partisan, 18 after Commentary), by Robert Lowell, his then-wife Elizabeth Hardwick & Jason Epstein, NYRB’s particular contribution to the history of the critical journal was its presumption that the public intellectual was also apt to be a tenured (or at least tenure-seeking) one. As it happened, this positioned the journal fortuitously when the center of anti-Vietnam debate & activity during NYRB’s first decade happened to be the American campus. The journal’s practical editors, Robert Silvers & Barbara Epstein, now have between them over 80 years of experience editing NYRB. That, at least, is in keeping with the Public Intellectual / Critical Journal modus operandi. Partisan shut down last year after the death of co-founder William Phillips, while Commentary still looks to Norman Podhoretz as an editor-at-large. The same man who called Allen Ginsberg & Jack Kerouac “Know-Nothing Bohemians” has more recently penned pieces entitled “In Praise of the Bush Doctrine” and “How to Win World War IV.” Is it any surprise that NYRB’s roster of contributors (and approved positions) is very nearly as fixed & immovable as that of the defunct Partisan? That the publication has resisted Bush’s siren song of the weapons of mass distraction is less an index of its “rebirth” than a consequence of how its audience’s demographics differ from these other, older rags.

I take the role of the public intellectual seriously – that’s what brought me to The Socialist Review, where I served as executive editor for a few years in the late ‘80s. It’s an important part of what I do as a poet & even an important component to my day job as a market analyst. You can’t tell a product development director that Marx’ falling rate of profit isn’t real, because he or she has to confront the process of commoditization in real time. The original pocket calculator cost $6,000 only three decades ago.

The same processes are impacting literature – including poetry – that have impacted everything from the “nucular” family to the way print media cover the news. No surprise there. From my perspective, the most disconcerting aspect of this has been the not-quite monopoly that “professional readers” within literature programs have imagined themselves as having with regards to poetry & poetics. If I ever read another piece of theory that attempts to prove its point by turning to look at the 19th century realist novel I am apt to go postal. And when the likes of Frank Kermode & Stanley Fish dis literature altogether, it only confirms my suspicion that their relationship to it was damaged from the start.

So my interest in blogging can be looked at from two perspectives. First, I was seeking out a medium for myself that would let me organize my thinking with regards to poetry, poetics & the concentric circles of intellectual & social activity that surround them. Second, I was hoping to nudge along other poets into doing something of the same thing – on the general theory that I learn as much or more from reading as I can from writing. Happily, literary blogs jumped the shark some time ago and there are now hundreds altogether, including dozens that include serious, insightful critical interventions into poetry.

When I look at something like Into the Blogosphere, what I see, in part, is the academy attempting to recuperate a critical discourse that is starting to get a little out of hand. My guess is that that’s going to be like picking up mercury with chopsticks. So while I don’t expect the web or blogs to cause the collapse of literature programs, I do think that the margins are apt to blur a fair amount as to what is “legitimate” critical discourse & what is some crazy like me on his hobby horse.

The ultimate test will be what poets themselves find to be useful. And from the perspective of the academy, that is the most unfair of all possible results, precisely because it’s not one that can be shaped or controlled. From that perspective, the “peer review” of the refereed journal – a process that in practice is close to 100 percent corrupt – will find itself supplanted by what poets choose to worry about, what they choose to keep in their book bag next to their notebook. So what’s it going to be? The latest twitch in post-reader-response theory or Kerouac’s “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose”?