A member of my immediate family has been in a health crisis for some time now. One very minor (to me) side effect of this has been that I haven’t had the time – let alone psychic energy – to focus on the blog that I would have liked, especially over the past month. One of the things I’ve haven’t done much of is to keep track of comments streams as they emerge in response to different posts. The streams have almost always felt to me a lot like the bar conversation that might occur after a talk – interesting, sometimes valuable, but also sometimes only marginally related to the post itself. Each stream seems to have a life of its own – a perception I see borne out whenever a new post elicits very few comments while some storm is raging on another stream that’s a few days old.

By the time I noticed what was happening to the stream that accompanied my note on Barbara Jane Reyes’ Poeta en San Francisco one week ago Monday, the donnybrook was in full swing. Reading through all of the posts – including several that have subsequently been deleted by their authors (especially by Eileen Tabios), I’ve concluded that the brouhaha was inevitable the instant Lilac remarked “I meant that this poet isn't very striking metaphorically compared to her exotic look,” but that what was actually going on was much more than just a response to the implicit – but unmistakable – racism within that word “exotic” and by the shift in discourse from its focus on the poem to the poet. Exotic by definition is a positional term, and whatever is characterized by that adjective is consciously placed outside of whatever circle one is drawing.

By the time the verbal riot died down – it seems to have topped out at around 100 messages – things had gotten quite a bit uglier. There were multiple strains of argument, only one of which seems to me to have focused on the initial cause – the discomfort many readers seemed to feel at Reyes’ particular conjoining of the sacred & profane in the poem “[ave maria].” I’m persuaded, as I said in my original note, that this is a powerful poem, valuable in its own right, but the vehemence with which some others disagreed made me think that it may have been more powerful than I at least had anticipated, regardless of whether or not one found value there.

There were multiple comments in the polyphony of the stream that could be interpreted as racist, especially those made by Lilac, an Anglo woman living as a Muslim in Lebanon. Few of these – I won’t say none – were directed at Reyes & none struck me as intended to intimidate, instances where I might have thought about stepping in & deleting comments. Otherwise, when people make fools of themselves in the comments stream, I think it’s useful to leave the evidence alone for all to see.

One especially embarrassing stream-within-the-stream was a shouting match between Curtis Faville & Eileen Tabios, tho it’s impossible to read it now that Eileen has redacted her comments. Both may be surprised to discover that I think each is an important & valuable contributor to the poetry scene & that I suspect that the retired federal bureaucrat & wine connoisseur and the retired stock broker & Napa Valley vineyard owner would discover that they have a lot more in common than they can imagine, if they would but shut up & read each other’s work & words with an open mind. For one thing, both have made valuable contributions to the world of small press publishing – to which each seems quite dedicated – and neither seems at all concerned with “fitting in” to any old School of Quietude frame.

Why we expect the world of poetry to be any better than larger universe, I’m never quite sure. Clearly the poem, as such, can be a model of unalienated labor in a world where such examples are few & far in between. But among poets you will find progressives (many), reactionaries (some), & every step in between, including more than a few people whose political thinking, to the degree it exists at all, is simply a mess. This should not be news.

This blog has evolved over three and one-half years. If these notes represent my thinking of whatever subject happens to be at hand, the blogroll to the left has emerged as a service. When, as happened a few days ago, I screw up a single html character and blow away some portion of the list, I hear about it fairly quickly from people who use it as a method of finding various literary blogs. The comments stream is a service of a different order – I think there can be real value in that “bar conversation” and am not terribly concerned that streams go off on tangents at times. It would be great, tho, if people would just respect one another once they’re there & act accordingly.