In a message dated 10/3/2006 7:00:18 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
[log in to unmask] writes:

There is a recent phenomenon in poetry that trumps by far any
"overpublishing" that poets may be doing in the more traditional venues
and forms:

Blogs.

Mind you, I have no problem with them, for the most part, and some are
often educational and entertaining to read. But if one is concerned with
cases of graphomaniac self-show and promotion in the poetry world, this
is really where to focus one's attention, it seems to me. What are
twenty-one books next to the endless scrolls of text, publication
announcement, diaristic narcissism, and self-photographic display on the
hundreds and hundreds of Poet-Author blogs?

Someone is going to write an interesting book one day on "Poetry Blogs
as a Sub-Species Mutation in the Evolution of the Author Function." To
be published by an academic press and offered to committee by an
Experimental poet for his or her tenure, no doubt...

Yes, some of us old-fashioned types stubbornly stick to listserves for
the flaunting of our egos...



Kent,
No doubt blogs are the phenomenon of note when it comes to the web
in the last 5 years or so. I held out till early in 2006…but succumbed.
_http://www.ursprache.blogspot.com/_ (http://www.ursprache.blogspot.com/)
Where I do some aphoristic scribbling. sprinkled with literary quotes;
something like a commonplace book, that happens to be open the public.
With no pictures, just words…
 (http://www.ursprache.blogspot.com/)
My definition of an aphorist: Someone too short to hop a train of thought.
 
For all their problems, the,periodic flame wars and 'ego flaunting' as you
say,
the listserves, at their best, do seem to operate like café or salon
societies.
With people coming & going, some sitting silently with their backs to the
wall watching
or just staring into the middle distance, while others engage in fitful
conversations
that veer off this way & that at the whim of a bit of gossip or some
literary
news of the day.
 
The blogs are more like nodes or small cities on an invisible map.
Each with a self-elected mayor on a soapbox holding forth…irregular roads
connecting each dot/polis on a shifting cyber landscape…but never quite
organizing
themselves into a communication network or becoming a mutually-beneficial
community.
 
However, in some ways, you could say that the blogs took the pressure off the
listserves. Gave certain poets a place to spew and vent without limits.
Leaving the listserves
as the places for shorter, more directed word bursts and dispatches.
Finnegan