Some time this weekend, this site will have its 500,000th visitor. That is, reader-wise, an unimaginable number. When, in August 2002, I started this, I had a goal in mind equivalent to the number of readers at a successful reading: 30 per day. That is still, I think, a perfectly reasonable goal, tho it would have meant reaching my 500,000th visit sometime in 2048, a point at which I will be – on the off chance that I'm still around – a couple of years older than Stanley Kunitz is now.
I had obviously not understood the difference between reading online & the physical event of a talk or a reading. Not only is it easier to get to a website than it is, say, for me to make the hour-long¹ trip to Kelly Writers House, my commitment of time once I'm there is very different. I may be getting over 800 visits per day currently, but the typical stay is just slightly over one minute. If this is at all typical, the upside is that a reader can visit quite a few favorite poetry & poetics blogs during the course of a half hour.² That in turn actually increases the degree to which such blogs can function as a public sphere for poetry. And that, it seems to me, is the real value in the form.
In the process of writing these notes, day after day, I've learned far more than I could possibly have imagined when I first embarked on this process. The most obvious example would be that I had to give up my 1970s-centric map of the poetic landscape & replace it with one more appropriate to the 21st century. The absolute number of new, younger poets is one thing – the percentage who are actually good is even more daunting. But the process has forced me also to rethink poets whose work I thought I already knew, from Robert Duncan to Bill Deemer to Amiri Baraka.
Rethinking is good. In general, people don't challenge their own assumptions nearly often enough. That old bumper sticker – Question Authority – really needs to begin at home.
¹Presuming reasonable afternoon traffic on Route 3. If I try to come in via Schuylkill, the main east-west artery into Philadelphia, during the evening rush, it will take between two & three hours. On a Sunday morning, tho, the same trip takes just 30 minutes.
² Contrast, the discussion of anything from multiple perspectives. Take, for example, the World Series as viewed by two poets with deep connections to Chicago, Ray Bianchi & Tim Yu, and with a third who is a serious baseball fan, Jim Behrle.
