David Milofsky, who has a column in the Denver Post, asks the following:

 

(W)hat I'd like to know is what function you see the blogs providing in the literary world, who you imagine your audience is and whether or not, in time, you think blogs and bloggers will build a sufficient audience to provide a real alternative to the straight book press. I edited literary magazines for fifteen years and came away feeling rather disillusioned by the experience. I had imagined that there was a large literary audience out there ready for the kind of challenging fiction and poetry we were offering but if there was, they weren't buying our magazines and books. Do you imagine this kind of impassioned discussion of writers and book will work on the web but not in the bookstores? 

 

I guess I should start this at the end of that first burst of questions: I never imagined that “blogs and bloggers will build a sufficient audience to provide a real alternative to the straight book press,” mostly because that alternative already exists in the extraordinarily rich world of small press publishers. At most, two or three percent of contemporary poetry ends up in books brought out by the trade presses – see that list of eight presses that have popped up, year after year, in the New York Times Book Review’s annual list of “notable” books. Because trade press volumes do get broad general distribution, it’s a shame that, as poetry publishers, they aren’t any better in their selections than most small presses. But they’re not – most are really their own little scenes, friends of the publisher & the friends of friends.

 

This insularity prevents trade presses from really functioning as a meta-level of publishing, weeding out the chaff, etc. and giving the greats access to large audiences. The trade presses are much more filled with chaff than such good small presses as Flood Editions out of Chicago, Minneapolis’ Coffee House Press, Chax Press from Tucson, or Oakland’s O Books. And those are really just the top tier of small press publishers, relatively large operations with serious lists. The reality is that the basic unit in American poetry isn’t the book at all, but the chapbook, saddle-stitched or even stapled, more apt to be 12 pages or 20, rather than the 100-page volume. For every book of poetry with perfect binding today, there must be twenty chapbooks published in America. But if you’re at all interested in poetry, it doesn’t take that much effort in the age of the internet to connect up with a lot of these publishers.

 

So the answer is that I don’t see blogs as a replacement for what doesn’t need replacing. What I do see them doing is taking up slack that exists in the discussion of poetry. There is a huge gap between academic conferences, to which I’m personally allergic, and the sort of chatter that goes on at the bar after a good reading. Poets who write & talk about their work push themselves in different ways, I think they’re far less apt to simply accept the easiest possible route to a new line, a new stanza. They can turn each other onto new things, new writers or books, or just cluck their tongues at some shabby business. The ideal circumstance, I’ve always thought, was the writer’s talk, less formal than a paper given at a conference, aimed not at the tenure process but to inform & persuade friends who might also be poets. For awhile in the 1970s & ‘80s, there were some talk series going on in San Francisco, New York & elsewhere that really pushed poetry forward & made everybody work harder & smarter. That face-to-face thing has died back somewhat, but the advent of the net gives everyone a chance to have this conversation on pretty much a daily basis. In less than two and one-half years, my weblog has had just under a quarter million visits, an amazing number for something that discusses poetry & poetics, especially with a post-avant slant.

 

I always think of my audience as other poets – poetry in that sense is a very democratic medium. Poets function much more socially than do novelists, which is why groups form from time to time, and the social relationships between poets – even middle-aged white guys like me – tend much more to the camaraderie one might associate in music, say, with the early days of the rap scene, people hanging out, showing each other their moves, their latest samples. I am often reminded of the troubadour poets of Provencal, writers who had two separate oeuvres, one for the masses and another – they called it trobar clus – for their friends & colleagues. The evolution of literary genres – the book itself as a social institution, the rise (and later demise) of the novel, the role of cinema in becoming the “mass” form for narrativity in society – these have pretty much eliminated the need for poetry’s work as a medium for the masses, and poetry has responded by having its trobar clus expand into a rich, multi-faceted literature.

 

Think about it: as Naropa poet Anselm Hollo has noted, in the 1950s a young writer – as he was then – could buy every book of poetry published in America by large press or small in a good London bookstore. That’s literally because there were so few books, so few publishers, so few poets. Today, my weblog alone lists the blogs of some 400 other poets and the vast majority of poets have yet to begin blogging. I’m not suggesting that everybody on that list is Shakespeare, or Anselm Hollo for that matter. But that is a huge transformation that hardly anybody has begun to account for as yet. What poetry means socially in America is becoming something very different from what the trade presses could ever hope to represent. Or bookstores. With less than a dozen exceptions nationally (Woodland Pattern in Milwaukee, City Lights in San Francisco, Open Books in Seattle, etc.), bookstores have become almost completely irrelevant to poetry. Why? Because they don’t stock chapbooks, which means that the vast majority of volumes of poetry are just never going to be found there, good, bad, or indifferent.

 

Yet poetry is thriving in America, moreso now than ever before. Not only is more poetry being written, but more good poetry is being written than at any time in the nation’s history. What is also happening tho is that the economic equation is shifting. The poet with an audience of thousands is being replaced by many poets with audiences of hundreds. The web is a perfect way for those writers & readers to connect up if – and this is the big if – they can hear about one another. So blogs are a perfect means of connecting all these poets & readers together, seeing to it that this new condition of poetry in America doesn’t devolve into a hundred little local scenes, each isolated from the other. In this sense, the weblog doesn’t replace anything. What it does is give the world of poetry a commons, which is what connects all these other elements together.