Of course the fun part of a survey like the Terrain.Org study of poets and their use of online resources is when they get down to naming names, and listing what they do and don’t like. For example, when Simmon B. Buntin’s 137 respondents were asked to identify their three “favorite online poetry resources,” they listed 113 different web sites. Interestingly, tho, just eight were cited by as many as six respondents each – none had five mentions. The eight are graphed in the figure below:

There’s a ringer here – one of the two sites that advertised the survey last July was this blog – that accounts for my embarrassingly high score here. Still, this isn’t a bad roster of major poetry web sites – I was personally surprised to find Poetry Free-for-All, which I think of as a web equivalent of an open mic drop-in poetry workshop, listed, considering that a majority of responses to the survey came from readers of this blog. I need to think about that some. And I was surprised also not to see more people list Third Factory, MiPOesias, Selby’s List, Big Bridge, Duration Press, How2, Light & Dust, or PENNsound, all of which received between two and four citations each. Wom-Po proved to be the listserv most widely mentioned, but that was only twice. Poetry and Ploughshares were each mentioned once – the first is sort of sad when you think of the $100 million they have to put into their operations there. At $6.95 per month for an upgraded version of Site Meter, which is what this blog costs, I’m getting a lot more bang for my buck.

But the real message of a listing of 113 different “favorites” is just how decentralized poetry has become in our society – half a century ago, back in the heyday of Personism, Deep Image, the SF Renaissance, the Boston Brahmins, Black Mountain & the Beats, 113 web sites would have meant roughly one site for every three publishing poets in the United States. The twin literary heritages back then were called Raw & Cooked by some – Overcooked by some others – and they squabbled then as they squabble now. But the argument in those days seemed a lot more coherent – you could think of the New Americans as a group of unlettered barbarians or of the Brahmins as a bunch of Jeeves wannabes, reeking of mothballs – tho that coherence was enforced through the benign neglect of whole populations who proved neither fish nor foul. Now that everybody is pretty much allowed to play, the relationship of writer to audience is undergoing an amazing transformation, one that neither the schools nor the trade presses nor the so-called public media have even begun to figure out.

We can see this new pluralism in responses to other questions in Buntin’s survey as well. Asked which E-zines they liked to read, respondents listed 85 different choices. Once again only a seven received six or more mentions: Jacket (25), Terrain.Org (12), Can We Have Our Ball Back (12), Shampoo (9), How2 (8), MiPOesias (7), Typo (6). As with the previous question, Terrain.Org benefited greatly from being the sponsoring site for the survey, but none of the other ezines here is a surprise. We get only a slightly different list when we ask their three favorite e-zines to submit to: Can We Have Our Ball Back finished first, with just seven mentions, followed by Terrain.Org (a ringer here as well, methodologically), then four journals listed by five respondents each: Jacket, MiPOesias, The Hold & Mot Juste, a relatively new magazine that appears in PDF format.

Where the question of a plurality of tastes shows up most profoundly is in the question Who are your three favorite poets? Respondents listed 223 different people! Only nine were mentioned by as many as four people & nobody by more than five. So much for the settled canon. The nine who were most often listed were Billy Collins, Emily Dickinson and Mary Oliver with five mentions each, followed by John Ashbery, Rae Armantrout, Seamus Heaney, Wallace Stevens, Walt Whitman & William Carlos Williams with four. Any attempt to frame this survey as skewed towards the post-avant is pretty much cancelled by the presence of Collins, Oliver & Heaney right at the top of that list. Not one respondent listed Louis Zukofsky!