Carl Boon’s sixth question
feels more complex to me and, as it also addresses the question of blogging per
se, I’m going to just focus on this inquiry for today.
6. Your recent project is a web log, or "blog," that
chronicles daily and in great, tedious detail the goings-on of the avant-garde
writing community in and around Philadelphia. Your daily entries, often a thousand words or more, are filled with
analysis, links, schedules for readings in the community, and miscellaneous
poetry talk. Can you talk about this project? How do you see its role, its
importance? Does it fill some need in the poetry community? How long will you
maintain it?
I’ve been thinking
critically – even obsessively – about poetry since I was a kid. After The New Sentence, I continued writing
criticism pretty regularly until our twins were born in 1992. That first year
or two with twins is pretty intense & there was hardly a moment in which
one might have a complete thought, let alone have the time to write it down. My
goal was to not stop writing poetry and I felt successful just to have
accomplished that.
But, as my kids have grown
older, I’ve gotten back to thinking about writing & publishing critically.
First, it’s excellent discipline. The process forces you to read more
intelligently. Second, all critical writing is a form of organizing, even when
the writer doesn’t realize that. My problem was/is that I saw few contexts that
struck me as useful in sharing this writing.
There has been a real
falling off in critical thinking since the 1970s when various talk series in
particular got a lot of people up and speaking intelligently about writing,
their own & that of others. Part of it no doubt is the fault of writers in
my own age cohort, me included. The poetry wars of the late 1970s were hardly
an attractive proposition for younger poets, but in part that is precisely why
the various provocateurs started them.
And part of the problem of
course is the continuing near-monopoly on critical writing by institutions in &
around the academy. To be of any value at all, critical thinking about poetry
needs to be directed to poets. In the academy, poets are at best eavesdroppers.
But there has also been a
depoliticization of younger people generally & that has impacted poets.
Some of it has to do with the lack of tangible alternatives to unfettered
capital following the collapse of the old Stalinist bloc – although for decades
it has been difficult to find any western Marxist who would defend the
so-called “actually existing socialist countries,” in large part because state
control over capital is not socialism. In the West, there has been no primary
shared point of agreement as to the goals of the left since the U.S. exited Vietnam in 1974. That’s a long time for groups to go without
much sense of cohesion. The antiglobalism movement is not one thing, but many,
& many of them contradictory.
Identarian tendencies were a logical extension of the civil rights
movements of the 1950s & early ‘60s, but they have inescapably fed into
this demobilization by isolating the very people they seek to empower. You see
the long-term result in a lot of writing these days that is simultaneously
politically correct and
depoliticized, a politics really of cynicism and disgust. So this also becomes
an incentive not to organize, not to write critically.
On top of all this, I had a
personal reason for thinking about starting my blog. Since this past spring, my
wife has been struggling with a chronic disease called Reflex Sympathetic
Dystrophy, a neurological syndrome that is both painful & nasty. The
condition has been hard on her and put an enormous strain on everyone in the
family. It was in that context that I felt my sitting around thinking about
poetry, but not actively doing anything
about it beyond the simple production of my own poem, was really lazy &
inexcusable.*
So I decided to try a
process in which I would just write something critically pretty much daily and find
some means of putting it out there where poets might see it. It’s really as
simple as that.
Because my nephew Daniel has
had a blog for some time, as
now do both his mother & sister, I had some familiarity with the form and its potential. So while my family was having something of a
disastrous vacation this summer on an island off Nova Scotia – not a good place to be if your meds aren’t working
– I mulled over the idea of how I might start a blog that simply focused on one
thing: poetry as I experience it. I began it three days after our return to Pennsylvania.
I’ve been pleased with the
response it has gotten so far – I’m getting an average of over 60 hits per day,
over 100 three or four times each week – and the response, with a few notable
exceptions, has been positive. Right now, it is sort of the flavor of the month
with a certain strain of younger writer, but that will certainly pass.
Marjorie Perloff pointed out
to me, right at the beginning of the blog, that a major limitation of the form
is its scale. These are really short notes, mostly sketched out early in the
morning, then fiddled with over the remainder of the day before being launched.
In this sense, the blog is closer to, say, L=A=N=U=A=G=E
as a project than, say, either Poetics
Journal or Chain. Though I guess
it’s worth noting that it has added up to more than 150 pages in less than
three months.
As to how the blog will
develop or how long I may maintain the site is really something I can’t tell.
I’m learning as I go along & it’s still fun, not a sense of obligation at
all. I don’t see it continuing on indefinitely any more than I would a poem.
But what would in fact be
even better would be to see a number of other blogs on the same general subject
that would take off & do their own thing and carry the conversation ever so
much further out into the universe. Right now the ones I read most constantly
& closely are those of Jonathan
Mayhew, Brian Kim Stefans & Laurable. May a thousand
blogs bloom!
* My wife
has noted that I began writing as a ten year old because of the difficulties of
growing up in a dysfunctional household. That the stress of her illness should
lead to my blogging strikes her as profoundly parallel behavior.
