Column076 — July/August 2006
Mini-Survey of the Internet, Part One
Volume 38, Numbers 7-8, July-August 2006
Fieralingue.
Webmaster: Anny Ballardini
www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome
Googlefight
www.googlefight.com
Michael P. Garofalo’s Index to Concrete Poetry
www.gardendigest.com/concrete/index.htm
Michael P. Garofalo’s Concrete Poetry Website
www.gardendigest.com/concrete/concr1.htm
Michael P. Garofalo’s Concrete Poetry
www.gardendigest.com/concrete/this.htm
minimalist concrete poetry.
Blogger: Dan Waber
www.logolalia.com/minimalistconcretepoetry
po-X-cetera.
Blogger: Bob Grumman
www.reocities.com/comprepoetica/Blog
Xerocracy.
Blogger: Malcolm Davidson
Website: xerocracy.blogspot.com
On the Internet, someone lamenting David Lehman’s dismal The Oxford Book of American Poetry opined that popular music would be the saviour of contemporary American poetry. Not so. Popular music isn’t doing anything for American poetry that it hasn’t been doing for decades, maybe centuries. If (serious) poetry is to be saved, it will be computers that save it. The Internet will blog it to the few interested in it, and computer-enabled publish-on-demand outfits will make inexpensive hard copies of it available to the fewer who actually want to spend money on it. In fact, it already does.
I won’t say anything about Lehman’s anthology except repeat my long-expressed vain hope that someday a viable list of schools of contemporary American poetry will be created to serve as the basis of an anthology in an edition of more than a few hundred copies like The Oxford Book of American Poetry that will cover the full range of superior contemporary American poetry. It’d have to be edited by someone conversant with far more kinds of poetry than Lehman; ideally, by a group of editors, each of whom is an expert in the school of poetry his section is on. Back to the Internet, and how important it is for serious poetry.
Firmly establishing that is the central aim of this column, and my next two or more. First, though, a bit about an amusing site I happened onto recently, googlefight.com. I’d had my first bad computer crash early in March, and was doing a search on my own name to try to round up lost links to work of mine on the Internet. (One quiet but wonderful virtue of the Internet is that you can use it as a display cabinet for your work–but you need to know the addresses of the sites your work is at.) One of the links I turned up was to this “Googlefight,” which I’d never heard of. Curious, I went to it.
It turns out that Googlefight is a cyber-arena at which a visitor can find out which of two words or phrases appears most on the Internet, or so it seems to me. In any case, someone had put my name up against Ron Silliman’s there. I was amazed at my score: near 40,000, an absurdly high number–though Ron trounced me: he scored 280,000. When that contest was over, I started one between catsup and poetry. I forget the score but poetry won by a huge amount. Fun site. (Note, some names, like those of poets Mike Snider and David Graham, are shared by too many people for Googlefight to work well with them–although Mike felt he got a fairly accurate score with “Mike Snider, Poet.” Also: it’s important to put quotation marks around your name or other term: I beat Ron when I ran my name without quotation marks against his without quotation marks because of Northrup Grumman and other firms using the Grumman name.)
Okay, now to the blogs and similar websites I happened on during my search, some because my name was there, others because the ones my name was at had links to them, and the rest because I was previously familiar with them or those running them. I don’t know how I got to Xerocracy, which is run by Malcolm Davidson–in Gdansk, Poland, of all places. He has a series of entries subtitled: “The rules of poetry as derived from whatever I happen to be reading .” Such long-running discussions of poetry are common on the Internet, and most encouraging to those of us who sometimes fear no one at all cares about the art. Among Davidson’s rules is “Rule 17: contrary to one common anti-art complaint, you can’t just randomly insert line breaks into a text and get a poem. “Reading strategy: take a poem you don’t know well, pull out all the line breaks, then come back to it later and see if you can put them back where they were. “Are the line breaks need where they were? Are they needed at all? Look at the Bukowski piece again to see why he wrote this:
from the sad university
lecterns
these hucksters of the
despoiled word
working the
hand-outs
still talking that
dumb shit.
“and why he did not write this:
from the sad
university lecterns
these hucksters
of the despoiled
word working
the hand-outs
still talking
that dumb shit.
“So it may not be the greatest poem in the world, but it has been constructed with some care, not just bashed out with random line breaks.”
This drew three comments. Someone signing himself, “Michael,” changed Bukowski’s lineation, without comment, to:
from the sad university lecterns
these hucksters of the despoiled word
working the hand-outs
still talking that dumb shit.
The blogger, Davidson, I assume, but calling himself, “eeksypeeksy,” said, “That’s pretty good. Maybe better than his, though his shorter lines may be better for throwing vicious little concrete chunks up at the lectern.”
I then came in with, “Bukowski’s version is much better than Michael’s because the line- breaks are much less expected–or certainly were when he wrote it. His kind of line- breaks are pretty common now, I guess. But I hit your blog’s comment button to air a minor gripe. I say you most definitely CAN “just randomly insert line breaks into a text and get a poem.” What you won’t get is a GOOD poem. For me, what I call “flow-breaks” are what differentiate poetry from prose. Line-breaks are the main kind of flow-break.”
A major problem with blogs is that no one ever answers me. Okay, I exaggerate–Geof Huth does. Eeksypeeksy didn’t. But, ah, the pleasure of being able so frequently to fire off a response to what someone says in print and know it will be published, unlike almost all letters to the editors of bigCity publications.
Gee, I thought I’d say a lot more about the many blogs and other websites I’ve been visiting, but I’m already out of room. Nonetheless, I’m going to leave the names of those I didn’t get to on my list, Anny Ballardini’s because it boasts what is probably the most eclectic collection of poems on the Internet (including a selection of mine, which is the real reason her site made my list, of course), my own blog because it’s mine; and the sites of Dan Waber and Michael Garofalo because they are excellent sources of first-rate concrete and related poetry, and commentary thereon. Dan’s has an especially interesting essay by Karl Kempton on the history of visual poetry.