Column078 — November/December 2006
Mini-Survey of the Internet, Part Three
Small Press Review,
Volume 38, Numbers 11-12, November-December 2006
Chris Lott’s Blog.
www.chrislott.org/2003/09/01/why-this-blog-sucks.
Mike Snider’s Formal Blog.
www.mikesnider.org/formalblog.
po-X-cetera. Blogger: Bob Grumman.
www.reocities.com/comprepoetica/Blog
.
Petulant Muse
Another Sonnet? Baby, have a heart…
Try something multi-culti — a ghazal! —
Or let me really strut my stuff and start
An epic — Sing! Muse — oh, we’ll have a ball!
You’ll be important when we’ve finished it —
Just think — your name on Stanley Fish’s lips,
Our poem taught in Contemporary Lit,
The fame of Billy Collins in eclipse!
And talk about commitment! I’ll be yours
For years! If we get stale, then, what the fuck?
My sister Callie knows some kinky cures
For boredom. You should see … no, that would suck.
Just fourteen lines, and then I get to rest?
I think our old arrangement’s still the best.
.
I’m sneaking this poem by Mike Snider into a column ostensibly about the Internet because it’s the first poem in Mike’s book, 44 Sonnets, which he advertises at his blog (where he also writes fascinating essays about formal verse), and because I say the following about it at my blog: “I’d call this a serious light poem. By that I mean it’s clever and fun and funny, but intelligent, with some involvement with consequential Artists’ Concerns. In any event, I love the consistent tone and the way it dances intellectuality and academicism into its mix with its references to Fish, the ghazal (Arabic poem with from 5 to 12 couplets, all using the–good grief–same rhyme) and to Calliope, the muse of epic poetry, the Internet just told me (the narrator I would guess to be Thalia, the muse of comedy and of playful and idyllic poetry). It feels like a painting of Fragonard to me, which I mean as a compliment.”
Ergo, the poem nicely serves to demonstrate the virtue of the Internet as a place where you can easily find out about worthwhile poetry you would have trouble finding out about anywhere else–and discussions of it (for nothing except the cost of whatever electricity your computer uses while you’re looking, and a fraction of your monthly hook-up fee). It’s also where you can sound off about poetry, as I did above. It’s an automatic publisher, and storer, of whatever you feel like gabbing about. Ideally, you’ll get feedback. I didn’t in this case, but sometimes I do.
The one large problem with blogs (like the small press, and–more so–the micro-press) is that they are near-invisible. I have lots of ideas about how this should be attacked, most of which I’ve rattled on about at my blog. One thing needed is a search engine you could key with names of poets you like that it would use not (merely) to get to blogs that mention those names but to blogs those names suggest you would like. A given name would go to some systematic overview of the schools of poetry now in operation of the kind I’ve been vainly calling for, for something like a decade now. Once there, it would pick out the schools you’d most likely be interested in and send you to them.
I’d need five columns to have space enough to mention all of my ideas for alleviating this problem, so will leave it for now to get going with my survey of the Internet. This time around the featured site is Chris Lott’s blog. Forgive the egocentricity, but when I went out to it to see what I could say about it, I did a search on it for my name. Here is what came up: “There’s another aspect of the approach of some of the post-avant weblogs and theorists that doesn’t sit too well with me, which I mentioned briefly in my longer screed below… the underlying (and not so underlying) sense of cynicism that comes out in some of the critiques. When I was first confronted with Bob Grumman’s Mathemaku poems, for example, I made a flip comment to the effect that they struck me as ‘pointers to poems’ or ‘ideas that could become poems’ when the real problem was that I hadn’t taken the time to really open my ears (and, most importantly, my eyes) to approach them with a generous consideration. The implication of my words was that the poet had not yet put in the work needed to craft a poem. I was called on this implication, and rightly so. Bob maintained, and I believe him, that he worked as hard on any one of these short, visual poems as any craftsman of mainstream narrative poems does. Maybe even more so, given that he is also creating/synthesizing a new kind of form.
“But for too many, this attitude of approaching the work on its own merits only applies as long as it is convenient. Those that decry the traditionalist lack of estimation are quite willing to posit theories about a poet’s ‘fundamental dishonesty’ in writing in a ‘received form,’ and they are quite happy to surmise about the laziness they are displaying in writing in an existing mode. If this isn’t, in itself, a dishonest and hypocritical position (and I don’t think that most of the post avant crowd is dishonest), then I am left to think that it must come from an essential cynicism or resentment that sometimes makes it impossible for the reader to separate their estimation of a poetic work from the life and personality of the poet, or their position in the academy. Hayden Carruth, for example, has written some great work. I’m not going to pretend otherwise, or refuse to accept his work on its own terms because he was well-educated and worked at a University.”
Yes, I like that Chris comes off here on my side–and that he says things I pretty much agree with beyond that. But I’m quoting him so extensively because his words provide so excellent illustration of his outlook and style–and of what blogs at their best can be: intelligent, self-critical, exploratory, tolerant.