Friday afternoon, this site received its 400,000^th visit. My reaction to this level of response is pretty much what’s it been from the start – I feel amazed & humbled & awed. When I started at the end of August 2002, what I had in my mind in terms of readership was an average of 30 per day or so, the equivalent of a successful reading anywhere in the United States (& I’ve seen plenty of successful readings with an audience only one third that size). My real goal, then & now, had to do with articulating my own thinking.

The first time I visited Charles Bernstein at SUNY Buffalo, he made a comment about the poetics program there that resonated because it was, almost word for word, something Jack Gilbert had said to me in the 1960s about the creative writing program at San Francisco State – “this is virtually the only opportunity many of these students will have to stop and consider poetry, and to discuss it with people as passionate about it as they are.” This, of course, is something that poets in any urban scene have at hand, if only they’re willing to do it, whether formally through talk series, or informally, after readings at bars or over coffee or in bed. The academy, of course, offers this in a heavily mediated way to students. The difference between a talk series & a college lecture series is not unlike the difference between a spring day and a spring day under the influence of a heavy head cold or allergies. Or so it’s always seemed to me. For faculty at colleges, the mediation gets even a little more convoluted, since it’s rare for writers sympathetic to one another to be employed on the same campus at the same time – teachers must become conference junkies if they want to have regular discourse with peers, or else settle for discussing poetry with bright young kids who may be interested, but whose background can’t possibly match the depth of their own.

Blogging, it seems to me, offers an interesting middle ground here. It can be as informal as the bar or bed chat – less so, even, if we use Jim Behrle as our yardstick. Or it can be quite ambitious intellectually, or somewhere in between. And that degree of engagement can vary day to day, depending on what else might be going on in one’s life.

I was moved by – and generally concur with – CA Conrad’s defense of the internet as a mechanism for erasing the disparities of geography, which he gave as a comment to my note listing the Terrain.Org survey on poetry & the net. Some of the very best bloggers do so at a great physical remove from any of the mainstream literary centers of our (or any) time. And the fact that several of the best also happen to teach for a living underscores what I suggested above about the isolation of the faculty post-avant.

One thing that has surprised me, thus far, is that the gradual expansion of readership here hasn’t yet maxed out – I keep thinking that it’s inevitable, that the curiosity reader will eventually tire & go away & that the people who read this blog just to feel outraged will gradually find somebody new to go pick on. That may happen, but it hasn’t occurred yet. Indeed, the number of visits per day has doubled since last February. That’s a faster rate of growth for this site than it had during the same period last year, by quite a bit.

If this is journalism, it is so only in the most literal sense of the word, the ongoing pursuit of the values of a journal. To date, writing here has caused the following things to happen:

1. I’ve been able to sharpen some vague thinking into much clearer concepts: post-avant, School of Quietude, the idea that editing’s first task is to offer context
2. I’ve had to become more rigorous in my reading, to actually think a little about what to read next & why
3. My mental map of contemporary poetry has changed profoundly
4. I’ve had to acknowledge the presence of an entirely new generation of poets & recognize that they really are the “poets of today,” however you might care to define that. Their concerns are quite different from those that preoccupied me & my friends when we were in our 20s & 30s. I’m really happy to concede that the world of poetry is neither as white nor as male as it used to be. This is one of those great results, not unlike being able to live in a world in which the gay community is comfortable being themselves & not hiding in the closet. As a straight white male, I’m deeply enriched by such developments.
5. I’ve met, online & sometimes later in person, a huge number of interesting new people & gotten to know several folks I’d already met quite a bit better
6. My correspondence has gone up dramatically
7. So has the arrival of books in the mail – twenty books in one week is not uncommon. Some of these are books I would have surely bought, but many others are by people I might never have heard of otherwise – including some real gems, like Mark Truscott, Laura Sims, Joseph Massey or Graham Foust.
8. Three folks are currently sending me a new poem via email every day.
9. I’ve had to recognize the growth & maturation of vispo in the United States, which has evolved well beyond the ghetto of concretism it was in during the 1960s.
10. I’ve become much more conscious of how many different modes of English there are – not that I didn’t know this already, but I didn’t have to see it & think it & read it every day. One trip down the blogroll to the left will cure anyone of any fantasies concerning homogeneity.
11. I’ve been able to spread the word about some poetry I care about a lot.
12. I sometimes come up against other people’s expectations in ways I hadn’t expected. For example, the idea that one would think of anthologies in terms of teaching seems completely foreign to me. Probably because I don’t teach & don’t use such books in that fashion.
13. My own poetry is being solicited at a much greater rate than I can possibly manage. One of my biggest failings over the past three years has been the haphazard nature of my responses to this.
14. I’m being invited to read more often – so much so, in fact, that I’ve learned to say No for the first time in my life. I’ve turned down trips to Oregon, Finland & several places in between as a result. (I have had to seriously rethink the economics of readings also, especially since honoraria have not risen at all during my 40 years of reading in public, unlike the cost of everything else. I don’t make a penny on a reading if I’m not making in excess of $500 per day for every day I’m away from home, with all expenses paid – I think that’s true for almost any poet who doesn’t teach for a living. Too many readings would be not a boon, but a disaster, financially. The same economics apply to conferences as well, which is why I attend so few.)
15. Writing here has pushed my own poetry forward in ways I would not have expected & which I don’t think (yet) I can fully articulate. As I type up the manuscript for the last of The Alphabet, & as I work on the first two sections of Universe, this seems as plain as the nose on my face, but that actually makes it harder, not easier, to discuss.

All of this is just a preface to my saying thank you for dropping by. I hope you find some value here each time you visit.