The story as best I understand it is this: Blogger in its something-less-than-infinite wisdom has been worrying about its latency rate, the amount of time it takes for individual pages to load, throughout the entire Blogspot system. The problem, Blogger concluded, was that some pages offer TMI. So it decided that it should limit how much data can go onto a single page throughout the entire system. But it didn’t warn users properly and it still doesn’t offer any mechanism for knowing how much is too much. Obviously my blogroll and my standard links list are issues. So is some of my use of graphics – no more grids of ten book covers at the top of a Recently Received list.

I’ve moved the blogroll onto its own page, at least for the time being. There is a link in red in the left hand column. We¹ will continue to update it monthly (or thereabouts). And I will try to run links lists more often so that they will be shorter. I may go to a format like the one my nephew Dan uses – yes, we trade links all the time – but I want to be cautious about this, since I pay a lot of attention to order & to the verbal framing that goes into the link itself. If I can get this straightened out, I hope to bring the blogroll back here.

I’ve also re-configured my archives from monthly to weekly, which has the counter-intuitive consequence of making my archives list more than four times the length it used to be. But the material under each archive link is now limited to seven days, not as many as 31. That helps for some weeks, but I want to check it out for as many as possible. If need be, I may delete some of the older links lists, or even use the links page for them and move the blogroll back here.

I’ve tested Wordpress and there’s no question I could make it work going forward. Incorporating seven years of older blogs is another matter. It puts in aribtrary hard breaks (like after the first word) into what were once standard prose paragraphs. What it does to the formatting of poems I couldn’t even begin to guess, but I suspect it’s not pretty. I would spend a year or more just reformatting the archives if I did that. Still, if I continue to experience Blogger issues, I may move while retaining the older archives here. A million words is a lot to move.

And, as I’ve been asked this a dozen times, yes, I have complete archives offline – or will once I do February’s. One project for the future is to edit a series of small books around specific subjects, but I’m some ways away from that as yet.

In the meantime, thanks for your patience!

 

¹ Lynn Behrendt, who does the heavy lifting of staying current with which blogs have gone dark & is continually adding new ones, and myself, doing a little bit of formatting at the end of the process.

Every once in awhile, somebody says or writes something so over the top that it makes you stop & ponder what the real content of the message is. Thus, when I see a tweet such as the following by M. Alt., the pseudonym of an apparently Anglo male (big surprise) in Korea, that

Ron Silliman: your blog is a fucking graveyard, you morbid fuck.

I stop to ask myself what it is that I’m doing & why. And this was before yesterday’s note, memorializing Lhasa de Sela & Kenneth Noland, or even the mentions in Tuesday’s linkstream that Don Belton, Jaromir Horec & James Kavanaugh had died. What does it mean that I’ve noted eight deaths in one week?

One thing it invariably means is that I’ve missed some folks. When I read Poets & Writers, I note their lists of the recently departed & always discover a few writers either that I’ve never heard of before, or whose passing managed to skip past my own information resources, mostly because they never received an obit in a medium that touched the net.

I do hear, maybe two or three times per year, some negative comment about my memorializing the passing of poets and other artists whose lives & work I think relevant to the poetics focus of this blog, such as musicians & painters. But for every negative comment, I receive somewhere between 20 & 30 positive ones, including long heartfelt messages from family members of the deceased thanking me for taking the time to note their loved one and put up a few relevant links. That’s a ratio I can certainly live with.

I did not envision doing this when I began this blog back in 2002. I began rather by accident when I noted the passing of Robert Creeley. All I did when the news came from Marfa that he had died was put up a photo and a couple of links, but I noticed very quickly that my readership that week rose something like 40 percent. I was personally too upset by Bob’s passing to write any more right away, and yet people kept coming back to that blog note as if I had done something meaningful. My readership never went back down to its earlier numbers. Obviously this was touching people in a way I had not anticipated.

This forced me to recognize that the nature of my blog had changed somewhat, and was changing still. It was no longer simply me & my opinions, even if that’s all I had wanted it to be. It was becoming more of a community institution, an online zócalo, a web plaza to which people might come for news & information, not simply to hear me on my soapbox preach about the evils of Quietude. That was the point where I began to take adding lists of links to news items related to poetry (& more generally the arts) seriously. And I realized that I needed to cover more than just “my kind” of verse, nor just American, English language or western poetics. Just as the world of poetry is no longer the white male enclave it proclaimed itself to be 50 years ago (the year that The New American Poetry was published containing 39 white males, 1 African-American male & 4 white women), the idea that English language poetry can operate ignorant of the poetries in that language of Africa and/or India is going to seem ludicrous soon enough. Why not acknowledge that right now?

So my sense of this endeavor evolved, and with it the idea of noting significant passings got added to the mix. When you think of the fact that there are – to use the low-end figure – 20,000 publishing poets in the English language, and perhaps that many substantial artists in relevant other media, what you get is a community of some 40,000 adults, about what you might expect of a small city (Wilmington, Delaware or Berkeley, California, for example). When you plot out what 40,000 lives between the ages of 25 & mid-80s might look like on an actuarial table, you would anticipate something close to 800 deaths per year. Fortunately, this community skews quite young. There were only a few hundred such poets in the 1950s, which means that the number now in their 80s is disproportionately small when compared against an “average” community of similar size. My response to M. Alt is that it could be a whole lot worse than what you see here. And in 30, 40, 50 years, it most certainly will be.

As my sense of this blog evolved, I began to do some things differently. Not only did I do some things you might expect more from a community newspaper, such as include memorial notices & links of resources, I began to get some help. Lynn Behrendt does the remarkable job of keeping over 1200 blog addresses current each month and is the person who thought up the addition of collective blogs to that list (which several readers have told me is the best part of it as well). Don Wentworth contributes at least a quarter of the links you read each week. I’ve gradually shifted away from using bots & alerts to gather news to the point where maybe 80 percent of the links you see on the link lists have been sent to me by someone. Including personal friends and colleagues of Vic Chesnutt & Lhasa de Sela who felt they deserved to be acknowledged here.

And, I should note, this blog & the arts community it serves is not the whole of my life any more than it is yours. In the past week, the two most significant deaths in my life were of friends whom I have not mentioned here until now. Mark Helwege was a colleague of mine at IBM who was the VP of worldwide sales at Brainware when he died of a heart attack last weekend. John Irwin was a one-time armed robber who made himself into one of the best sociologists of prison life in America. Through his books, his work at San Francisco State & especially his role as the Gandalf of the Prisoners Union in California, John was perhaps the single most influential figure in the prison reform movement in California during the last half of the 20^th century.

Michael Conrad (1925 – 1983)

Ten years ago, at the behest of the Poetry Society, I answered the following question thus:

What are your predictions for American poetry in the next century?

It will be fabulous, problematic, troubling, wonderful- - and unlike anything we imagine today. Just as the Beats grew out of the affluence and McCarthyism that followed World War II and Language Poetry grew out of the Vietnam experience, the great literary tendencies of the next one hundred years will be determined in good part by upheavals we can ony guess at today. As always, the best writing will not be "platform dependent," even if some of it does use newly emerging technologies.

One decade hence, my glib response makes me cringe, not only for the parts I got obviously right – or, should I say, got right because they were obvious – but also for the part I got terribly wrong as well. That comes through less from the words than through the tone. I do use the cautionary terms problematic & troubling, but the tone is all huzzah. You can feel the Y2K New Years cap & celebratory whistle in place & ready to blow. Yech.

The “upheavals we can only guess at” were neither as mysterious as I made them sound, nor merely the provocation for innovative writing this depiction could be read as suggesting. The attack by Islamic extremists had been preceded by an assault on the very same World Trade Center several years earlier. Did we not think a group that took credit, warranted or not, for militarily defeating the Soviet Union in Afghanistan would not step up to the plate against the Great Satan itself? George W. Bush was not the first incompetent to be elected president, not even in the lifetime of most of this blog’s readers, nor the first to install what amounted to a criminal regime in the executive branch. Economies built upon bubbles have never been immune to collapse before – why should we have anticipated anything different?

What disturbs me about my tone of a decade ago is its failure to acknowledge in advance the pain & suffering generated by each of these events. But what disturbs me most about my own lack of vision was the failure to comprehend that such events would be linked, a virtual trifecta of evil the likes of which, etc.

As we step into the teens, I want to be clear then: there is absolutely nothing preventing the ascent of a neo-fascist state on these shores but the readers of this blog and people like ourselves. There is absolutely no reason that Sarah Palin, Lou Dobbs, Glenn Beck or even Ted Nugent could not become president. There is absolutely no reason to believe that the venture in Afghanistan will turn out any better this time around than it has for outside invaders at any time in the last half millennium. And there is absolutely no reason to believe that papering over the problems of the economy – which include the problems of health care – will do anything other than set deeper wheels in motion that sooner or later will come full circle. Have I mentioned the biosphere?

So my words of advice at the end of this decade are taken from the words of the late character actor, Michael Conrad, in his role as Sergeant Phil Esterhaus on the TV series Hill Street Blues, words that I’ve used before at the end of the poem Paradise. They feel much more appropriate. At the conclusion of each shift briefing to his charges, the sergeant would close with the same two sentences:

Listen. Be careful out there.

On December 10, 2004, I posted the note below.

It was twenty years ago today that I last had a drink. Not that anyone’s counting. Well, as people who know me must understand by now, I tend to count everything, so why not this? I was seeing a therapist at the time, one Charlie Vella out at Kaiser Hospital in San Francisco, & he suggested stopping “while we’re meeting,” but, once I stopped, I never went back. Something, curiously enough, I have in common with both Howard Dean and George W.

“Better to read Jack Spicer than to be Jack Spicer” is the way I’ve explained it to more than a few people over the years. That’s a sentence that’s underscored, in my case, by the coincidence that Jack Spicer & my father died on the same day.

When I was coming up as a young poet in the 1960s, there was still a romance to the myth of the hard-living poet, who drank ravenously, did drugs constantly & certainly did not practice what was not yet known as safe sex. I remember when first I met Paul Blackburn, seeing him rotate a quartet of substances – beer, whiskey, doobie & cigarette – constantly in motion. He was always sucking on something. As it happened, I never met Jack Spicer, precisely because alcohol killed him at the age of 40. Never met Kerouac for the same reason. Brad Gooch has detailed, accurately I think, how Frank O’Hara’s prodigious drinking made it impossible to keep him alive after he was hit by a dune buggy. Who knows what the impact of their habits might have been in the early deaths of Ted Berrigan or Charles Olson? There are at least three contributors to In the American Tree whose friends despair of ever getting clean & sober. And every poet in my age cohort recoils at the memory of how Darrell Gray destroyed himself. This is a list that, once you start drawing it up, never stops. And it always cuts close to home. I have a half-brother who is a late-stage alcoholic & there’s nothing I can do to counter that.

Over the years, I’ve had a few poets – three or four – tell me that it was important to them that I talked about this. So today feels like a good time to mention it here.

Five years later, the clock is still ticking. The trick is always the same. I only have to go without drinking for one day, but it has to be today.  This somehow works. I’ve never been to an AA meeting, but I’m glad they’re around and when I go to a big event, such as a folk festival, it’s good to see a tent announcing the Friends of Bill W. Just knowing I’m not alone is a serious comfort. Allen Ginsberg once talked to me at length about how valuable NA had been for him in dealing with a relationship to a drug addict. It reminded me how, when I wrote to Ginsberg for the very first time – I must have been 18, sending a poem Richard Krech later printed in the Community Libertarian – Allen wrote back to tell me not to “take too much dex,” (i.e. Dexedrine). He sent this on a postcard & my mother thought the word was “sex.”

Since I posted that note five years ago, I’ve heard from quite a few other people, and have seen my note referenced on other blogs several times. So saying this out loud seems still to be a good idea. There is no reason you have to die for your art. In fact, it’s better if you don’t.

About two hours after I posted my note about American Hybrid Wednesday morning, one of my kids had a medical emergency & ended up in the hospital. Which explains why things here have been a little ragged since then. He's home now, but I'm at one least week behind on everything, including breathing, so it will take awhile to get back up to speed.

I’m back and with only 914 emails in my in-box at work. I have blisters on my feet from walking everywhere in London for five or six hours on Monday, and then two hours more Tuesday between yet another BBC interview (this time for “The Strand,” on the BBC World Service) and lunch with friends. I had a great time & want to thank everyone, especially Tony Trehy & Carol Watts for making this fun as well as easy.

My single favorite comment of the entire trip came from a woman the night I read (for all of two minutes) as part of Geof Huth’s performance for the opening of the Signs of the Times exhibit at the Bury Art Gallery. “Are you Ron Silliman of the famous blog?” she asked. I allowed that I was. “I’ve read you for years,” she said. “I didn’t realize you were real.”

Geof Huth

Sometime this morning, I should arrive in Manchester in the north of England, the first member of my direct line to set foot on British soil since my great grandparents left here roughly 140 years ago. I will be in & around Manchester & Bury until next Monday, when I will take the train to London. It was on a Manchester-to-London train ride where J.K. Rowling first sketched out what would become the tale of Harry Potter, a fact that once would have impressed my sons.

What I know about the Text Festival in Bury is what I’ve heard from Tony Trehy, the organizer, and from Robert Grenier, who attended a few years back. I’m expecting to learn a great deal, and am approaching this entire trip as one potentially infinite educational opportunity.

One definite pleasure that I will have – today in fact – is meeting Geof Huth, whose visual poem “The Construction of the Alphabet” graces the cover and, in various guises, some of the inner pages of The Alphabet. I have been exceptionally fortunate with the covers of my books over time, and never more so than in the last two volumes, The Age of Huts (compleat) & The Alphabet. In each case, I got exactly what I wanted & the result was stunning. (In my next life, maybe I’ll be a book designer if they still have books.)

Given that I’ve been a fan of Huth’s work for several years now & that we live in neighboring states, it’s curious that we’ve not met before. I console myself with the fact that they’re big states & that we have professional careers in different industries that never put us at the same conferences. So I bow to the inspired programming of the folks at the Text Festival.

I’m not sure just how much blogging I will or won’t do over the next ten days. My rule-of-thumb is going to be to get out and look around, and also take some time to do some writing (not of the blog variety) while I’m here. If I can get online, and if I write anything for the blog, so much the better.

We have been without power for 24 hours at this point – I was fortunate to get yesterday’s post done before the branch hit the line. Right now I’m operating on battery power here and piggybacking on a neighbor’s wireless connection. And wearing more layers than usual, even for winter.

It is now becoming self-evident that right around the inauguration of Barack Obama, somewhere between the 18^th & 25^th of January 2009, this blog will receive its two millionth visit. Already visitors have clicked on more than three million links. I know this is basically one-tenth of what Matt Drudge had yesterday, but for poetry it’s not so bad. The run rate here for 2008 has been a half million visits and a million link clicks, numbers that suggest that there is an audience for whatever it is I’m doing. And the numbers continue to rise: the dates with the most visits ever (2603), and most links clicked (6734), are both within the past two weeks & this will be the first month in which links clicked exceed 100,000. Thank you for stopping by, for reading, for commenting, for arguing & especially for helping me to sharpen my thinking on any number of aspects of poetry.

It’s here. Twenty-nine years after I jotted down the first words (the opening lines of  “Force” actually), The Alphabet is real, tangible, and weighs three pounds. It arrived in yesterday morning‘s FedEx shipment, the driver lugging a 30-plus pound carton up to my doorstep. Each copy is nine inches high, six inches across, two and one-quarter inches deep. So deep that you can print my last name across the spine in 34-point type. 1,062 pages. 260,764 words, not including five pages of notes. Since Rae Armantrout collaborated on “Engines,” not every one of those words are mine.

Geof Huth’s vispo, “The Construction of the Alphabet” looks terrific wrapping around the front & side of the cover (and reiterated as a theme visually inside), and Michelle Myatt Quinn’s design is impeccable. As I told one of my sons, visual poetry is virtually the only kind that doesn’t appear anywhere in The Alphabet. Having Geof’s work here both acknowledges that and to some degree incorporates it as well. If you are going to put this many of your eggs into a single basket, it’s important to get it right. And I must say that Alabama has. The book isn’t perfect – books never are. But it is extraordinary, at least as a physical object.

Geof gives the book & design not one but two video presentations on his blog. Geof calls it “the poetry publication of the year,” which is generous, but which would no doubt send out even more endorphins except that I used mine up completely just looking at the book when it arrived. I think one part of me must have worried that I never would live to see this volume, the way Spicer never saw Book of Magazine Verse, let alone The Collected Books. Later in the day I realized that I felt ill from having expended so much adrenalin.

The University of Alabama Press has put together a nifty offer to promote The Alphabet and also Jerry Rothenberg’s Poetics & Polemics, 1980 – 2005. A thirty-percent discount is available on either one of these books, which will then get you the opportunity to buy, for just $5 each, two additional books that are already classics: Bill Lavender’s anthology Another South: Experimental Writing in the South and Marjorie Perloff’s Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy. The offer is good until November 30. Click on the PDF file order form here.

I’m going to be at the shore for a few days, then out to the Olympic Peninsula for a wedding in Port Townsend. Expect things to be spotty and/or pretty quiet until Labor Day.

Available for pre-publication orders today!

This is the poem I’ve been working on since 1979. I can’t even begin to tell you just how much of my life & soul are poured into these pages. “The Alphabet,” it says on the publisher’s website (and I wouldn’t disagree), “is a work of American ethnography, a cultural collage of artifacts, moments, episodes, and voices historical and private—that capture the dizzying evolution of America's social, cultural, and literary consciousness.” It’s also an extended meditation on the possibilities of form. Individual sections of The Alphabet include the following:

Albany
Blue
Carbon
Demo
Engines (written with Rae Armantrout)
Force
Garfield
Hidden
Ink
Jones
Ketjak2: Caravan of Affect
Lit
Manifest
Non
Oz
Paradise
Quindecagon
®
Skies
Toner
Under
VOG
What
Xing
You
Zyxt

At roughly 1,000 pages, The Alphabet is not an inexpensive book – $39.95 in paper – tho compared with paying $16.95 for a sixty page book of poems, it’s an utter bargain. Fans of Geof Huth will recognize his work in the cover art. The book will be available in September.

With its publication, I am now in the position of having all of my mature poetry available in print. I’m aware of exactly how rare this is in the year 2008. That presses like UC, Salt & Alabama would make such a commitment to my writing is genuinely humbling.

Now it’s time to turn my attention to trying a long poem, Universe.

"Ron Silliman's ongoing long poem The Alphabet . . . mingles quotidian observation, linguistic-philosophical reflection, and street-level social critique to produce as vivid, systemic, and cumulatively moving an account of contemporary life as any poet now writing."
—Times Literary Supplement

My turn on Joe Milford’s internet radio show – all 90 minutes of it – can be streamed or downloaded from the website today. Just click on the logo in the note below. The reading / chat was fun to do and I’ve gotten very positive emails about it from three different continents over the past 18 hours. I read from the PDF of my original manuscript of The Alphabet. Which is to say that I was staring into a screen, talking on the phone. It’s an interesting way to do an event.

Saturday, August 16

5:00 PM Eastern

Joe Milford Hosts Ron Silliman
on the Jane Crown Show

Call-in Number (646) 200-0176

 

Photo © Star Black 2008

I could tell you I’m taking the day off, it being my birthday & all, but the truth is that I’m on my second business trip in as many weeks and just too darn busy.

For the record, just weeding the blogroll of dead links caused the list to shrink by roughly 250 names, one quarter of its size. There will no doubt be a flurry of new additions – Lynn & I have already received something like 20 additional requests that we’ll get to in the next week or two. As I’ve noted to one or two people already, just because your zine, reading series or line of chapbooks has a Blogspot page doesn’t mean that it should be a part of the blogroll. The entire purpose of this blog, blogroll included, is to encourage discussion between poets & readers of poetry, and that’s really what the list itself is intended to signify & encourage. As is the case with the news links I post once or twice each week, I don’t have to approve of what’s being said, but, so long as it doesn’t strike me as overtly racist or sexist, I have no problems creating a link. Overall, I’ve been pleased overall with reactions to these features – for an hour one day last week, people were clicking on links at a pace slightly faster than one every six seconds.

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This link won’t be good for long. But you can catch Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book as a radio play if you hurry.

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I’m going to be on the road for a few days & won’t be taking the laptop. You are on your own till Monday.

A quick note. I’m getting 300 emails a day in my life, not including spam, maybe half related to my day job, but fully a third related to this blog. Many people send me poems they hope I will read & perhaps comment on, articles – I get a lot of links this way – cartoons, and questions from students. I have no secretarial support and a job that can easily run to 70 hours per week. I also have a family. I’m over a year behind in updating my blogroll, and have a growing list of requests related to that. If you sent me something and I haven’t responded, it doesn’t mean that I haven’t necessarily looked at it, or that I hated it. Often it does mean that I don’t have the time to give it the attention I can see it deserves.

It was when the kind reader pointed out to me that not only had I misspelled Matthew Zapruder’s name and that of his book (which, frankly, looks alien to me in any possible spelling), but that I had also misspelled the title of my own book, that I had to concede that this here bronchitis is taking more of a toll than I’d care to admit. I’m going to give it a rest for a few days and see if I can’t push my IQ back up to a dull normal.

It took this blog two years & five months – from August 2002 until the end of January 2005 – to receive its first 250,000 visits. But it took only three years & two months – just nine more months – to receive the next quarter million and hit the half-million threshold. That ramp upward got steeper still as it took just 16 months to receive the next 500,000 and hit the million visit mark. That was February of last year – sometime Tuesday evening or Wednesday morning, the 1,500,000^th visitor will click on through.

These are not the sort of numbers I normally associate with poetry. That is three Woodstocks, or the current population of Philadelphia.

One thing this tally doesn’t represent is anything like 1.5 million separate individuals. There are a few hundred people who show up here daily and a few thousand more who come by with some regularity – once or twice a week perhaps. And a third, larger cluster that is far less regular, some of whom may do so only while taking a class that requires it. My guess is that those three groups combined add up to six or eight thousand people. That’s less than the number of poets who write in English, but still a sizeable fraction of the number of folks who care about poetry. And it’s more than the thirty a day I had hoped for when I first started this project.

There are all kinds of interesting ways that a marketer would want to cut such numbers, demographics being the default in that mode of thinking. What percentage of my readers are men and how does that relate to the percentage of people interested in poetry who happen to be male? What are the age breakdowns? Race? Religion – how many Lutheran are there here (how many Lutheran Surrealists)? How many readings do we attend each month & do we go out for a meal before or after? How much do we each spend on books? Etc. I know that among my comrades in the Grand Piano project, there are some who appear never to read this blog, and two or three who seem always to do so. I would suggest that this is probably to be expected from a cohort that ranges in age from late 50s to mid 60s – all of us are what we call “digital immigrants” where I work, people who came to the technology a little late in life, unlike my children who are digital natives, having used PCs since they were toddlers & Richard Scary’s Busytown was the software package of choice. Except that my Grand Piano co-authors are all people who have known me for at least 30 years, so I think that may boost the numbers artificially. After all, I do know poets from my age group who still avoid PCs pretty much altogether. They’re the last of a dying breed, and I think they know it.

I try to imagine what it must be like to be a poet today, particularly in the U.S., who is entirely off-line and still working with a typewriter. If I were that poet, I think I would find it strange, as if the social domain that is poetry were somehow getting away from me & becoming more & more ethereal. Where I used to see all the “important” literary magazines, say, in Cody’s or Moe’s in Berkeley or in City Lights in San Francisco, there are now many important journals that seem locked up out of sight, because they don’t exist in the print world – How(2), Jacket, mark(s), Big Bridge & so many more. I remember being a teenager & not being able to get hold of a copy of Locus Solus or Art & Literature & feeling totally frustrated by that. Try to envision this same phenomenon many times over for the poet who is not wired.

I can’t say that I’ve met any younger poets who consciously disengage from poetry’s existence on the net, tho I suspect some must exist. We are moving, faster than I think any of us (or me anyway) are conscious of, toward a day on which poetry is something that exists primarily on the web, having made the migration away from print & bookstores to a degree that right now seems unfathomable. Those older poets who currently refuse to publish on the web – they do exist – will discover soon enough that they have painted themselves into the proverbial corner. Far from being a “debased” terrain where works commingle without being presorted by “value,” the web simply is becoming the commons for such work.

I have been fortunate, especially being an old paradigm guy, to have had some success with this new medium. I don’t think what I’m doing here is in any way unique. I think I’m more consistent & dogged, and that I’ve thought through my positions whether or not anyone agrees with them. When people who do generally disagree with me sit around and argue over a concept I first threw out here – like post-avant or school of quietude – I have to admit feeling pleased. Even rejecting one of these ideas, if done thoughtfully, furthers the discourse, and that is the point really.

Do I have the capacity to stick this out another five years & six months? I have no idea. I do know that this process functions as the most powerful crucible for new ideas, for me, that I’ve found since the very earliest days of poets’ talks in the late 1970s. And that’s a powerful motivation. Thanks for coming along for the ride.

Two completely separate topics:

First, I’ve been going slowly through Geoffrey Gatza’s Thanksgiving poem for me (PDF), enjoying it more and more with each reading. It’s actually easier to see & read in the PDF format than in the two large packages it arrived in via the mail. It’s elegant in a way that would please both Oulipo and the finest French restaurants I’ve encountered & filled at the same time, with remarkably close fitting wit plus some happy surprises (e.g., an email chain in which David Shaddock suddenly turns up!). Today, I’m in awe of the suite of six dishes that go into The Baking Parchment Scroll – which arrived in a long tube the same day as the box – and which just happens to translate a significant portion of The Chinese Notebook – Gatza’s choice as his favorite poem of mine – into the discourse of cuisine. But yesterday it was the Cornucopia of World Cheeses, Spiced Cashews and Port in the form of a cartoon in which the Academy of American Poets appear as a school of whales. Or maybe it was “Soup Coup,” The Chocolate Bursting Bomb, which consists of the one millionth Fibonacci number transcribed in base 26, using the alphabet for digits, “brilliantly computed by John Bethencourt.” Indeed. Even in base 26, this appropriated poem takes up 58 of the 99-pages in the manuscript. Each day there seems to be something different, one feast for which I’m having no ambivalence about “leftovers.” Gatza obviously has my number, or at least my numbering system!

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Second, I’ve been contemplating what to do with/about the comments stream here. It’s gradually (or maybe not so gradually) descended into such a playground of pathology that I hear quite regularly from people who either cite it as the reason their weblogs don’t have comments streams, or who write me personal notes (always welcome!) because they don’t want their words subjected to the “debased discourse” that has become the norm there. I’m certainly aware of more than a few times of late when I wanted to wash my hands (or more) just from having to go through the moderation process. I’ve thought seriously about turning the comments stream off entirely. And if what I’m about to try doesn’t improve matters much, that probably is what I will do. But I do think there is a place for response here, at least potentially. And it pains me to see the posturing that absorbs and cancels out that possibility for far too many readers.

So I’ve decided to reverse the dynamics, at least for the time being. Henceforth, the presumption is going to be that comments don’t get approved unless they make useful and intelligent contributions to the discourse. My gut feel being the decider. The simply snide, the put down, the sexually and racially inappropriate, the whole repertoire of dysfunction, will have to build its own blogs or find other comment streams to inhabit. That should mean that it will get a lot quieter here right away, but hopefully over time this will lead to a rational and more human discourse that will be of greater value to everyone. This begins now.