Column082 — July/August 2007
Mini-Survey of the Internet, Part Seven
Small Press Review,
Volume 39, Numbers 7-8, July-August 2007
Cosmoetica.
Webmaster: Dan Schneider.
http://www.cosmoetica.com.
Mike Snider’s Formal Blog.
http://www.mikesnider.org/formalblog.
po-X-cetera.
Blogger: Bob Grumman.
http://www.reocities.com/comprepoetica/Blog.
Tomi Shaw’s Blog.
http://tomirae.blogspot.com.
One of the first blogs I came across that mentioned me when I was trying to round up links to my works on the Internet was Tomi Shaw’s. My name cropped up in her interview of someone named Jason Sanford. In conjunction with (gah) the Philistine poetry website of Dan Schneider, Cosmoetica. Sanford was actually praising the moron: ” . . . Dan educated himself about poetry by reading and studying everything he could on the subject. From his website Cosmoetica.com, he now publishes poetry and literary critiques that drive the literary establishment crazy. Basically, Dan takes a no-holds- barred, analytical approach to critiquing writing. If he likes your work, he says exactly why it is good. If he hates it, he lays out why in immense, excruciating detail. His site has literally recorded tens of millions of visitors since it debuted in early 2001. If you Google for information on poets like Bob Grumman or Thylias Moss, his critiques pop up. Dan and his website were even mentioned in the New York Times Book Review last year in the essay ‘The Widening Web of Digital Lit.’”
I fired off a comment, naturally. It got no response, naturally. As I keep saying, Internetters seem to just want to make assertions, then go their way; they don’t want to discuss anything (with anyone, not just me), which keeps the Internet from being as valuable as it could be. I said, “I agree with (Jason Sanford) that webmeisters and bloggers like Dan Schneider, who have a passion for some kind of poetry, and energetically promote their points of view, are the future of poetry, but there are a huge number of them superior to Schneider. I do applaud the way he takes on poetry he doesn’t like, such as mine, at some length. But he doesn’t really do much analysis, preferring assertions, and if any of his victims responds to his crap, he ignores him–except occasionally to lie about how he has “denuded” him. Evidence of all this is at my po-X- cetera blog. But, hey, thanks for mentioning my name!”
Near the top of the list of links an Internet search of my name will bring up is Schneider’s alleged “denudement” of me, which is annoying. All he did, by the way, was reveal his complete inability to understand what I was doing in a rough draft of one of my mathemaku at my blog, treating the rough draft as a completed work. He’s basically an estabnik, but proudly allying himself with the poetry establishment of the fifties, rather than with the present one–yet courageously pooh-poohing T. S. Eliot to prove his non- comformity. His poetry, as I show at my blog, is unadventurous and semi-competent at best in technique, and dead-standard in outlook, diction and imagery–except where it improves to incoherence.
For a change of pace, and to show what an excellent bookstore the Internet can be, here’s a sonnet from 44 Sonnets, a paperback by Mike Snider that he’s hawking at his blog (for just $3), and I deem well worth buying, unless you hate formal poetry. The sonnet’s called “Homework”:
My daughter’s learning how the planets dance,
How curtseys to an unseen partner’s bow
Are clues that tell an ardent watcher how
To find new worlds in heaven’s bleak expanse,
How even flaws in this numerical romance
Are fruitful: patient thought and work allow
Mistake to marry meaning. She writes now
That Tombaugh spotting Pluto wasn’t chance.
Beside her, I write, too. Should I do more
Than nudge her at her homework while I try
To master patterns made so long before
My birth that stars since then have left the sky?
I’ll never know. But what I try to teach
Is trying. She may grasp what I can’t reach.
Here is what I say about this at my blog: “The remarks I lost (when my blog crashed) were penetrating, I’m sure, but I remember them only vaguely. One thing I remember is marveling at how smoothly well these poems (and the rest of Snider’s poems in his book) carry out the aims of Iowa plaintext lyrics (i.e., standard contemporary mainstream American poems)–but employing rhymes (note, for example the abbaabba of the last one’s octave!) and fairly strict meter. Ergo, they deal sensitively with common human situations and end in effective epiphanies, all more or less conversationally–but with the plus of the significantly extra verbal music that meter and rhyme can provide.
“One value of being forced to re-type, and re-consider a poem one is critiquing, as I’ve had to do with these, is that it can sometimes lead to an improved interpretation. That’s what happened to me just now. For who knows what reason, I didn’t realize that the persona of the poem was writing poetry, so had him working on astronomy. So I missed the wonderfully fertile juxtaphor (implict metaphor) equating writing verse with astronomy (and the ones equating either with doing homework, or learning in general). And with poems for the sky-charts–explained sky-charts–of astronomy. All this along with the now stronger explicit comparison of the father’s work toward mastery of poetry with his daughter’s toward mastery of schoolwork, and the simple, conventional, but not pushy moral of the poem, “trying is what counts.” Consequently, I now count this poem a masterpiece; the others are “only” good solid efforts. Good brief character studies, too. (Note: I’m pretty sure Schneider would agree with me on this one, but even Philistines can be right about some poems.)”