Column084 — November/December 2007
Mini-Survey of the Internet, Part Eight
Small Press Review,
Volume 39, Numbers 11-12, November-December 2007
David Graham’s Poetry Library.
http://web.mac.com/drjazz/iWeb/Site/DGPoLibrary.html
Entropy and Me. Blogger: Halvard Johnson
http://entropyandme.blogspot.com
E-X-C-H-A-N-G-E-V-A-L-U-E-S.
Webmaster: Tom Beckett
http://willtoexchange.blogspot.com
Muse of Fire. Blogger: Jeff Newberry
http://museoffireblog.blogspot.com
NarcissusWorks. Blogger: Anny Ballardini
http://annyballardini.blogspot.com
Poetry Blogs. Webmaster: David Graham
http://web.mac.com/drjazz/iWeb/Site/Blogs.html
Tad’s Opus 40 Blog. Blogger: Tad Richards
http://opusforty.blogspot.com
Ursprach. Blogger: James Finnegan
http://ursprache.blogspot.com
As I hope I’ve shown here over the past year or more, there are an enormous number of good blogs out there about poetry, none of them getting a tenth of the notice pop artists’ and airheaded political partisans’ blogs are getting, of course–but out there. With this column, I’m wrapping up my survey of poetry blogs (and related websites). I’ve skipped an enormous number of excellent poetry blogs, but hope what I’ve written gives a reasonably useful beginning idea of their scope at present. If not, well, most of the blogs I’ve mentioned have lists of links to other blogs you can use to find out more about them.
For instance, David Graham runs an amiable little website called Poetry Blogs that, as of this writing, lists links to twenty blogs, with brief comments like this, regarding Tad Richards’s blog: “–not just poetry, but any man who loves both John Prine & Sonny Rollins is A-OK with me.” Poetry Blogs is part of a larger website, David Graham’s Poetry Library, that has similarly valuable sub-sites with links to poets’ home pages, poetry publishers, poetry journals, poetry essays, the full texts of books (free!) and craft tools (such as dictionaries, books on prosody, etc.).
I mentioned Poetry Corner Curator/Editor Anny Ballardini’s NarcissusWorks in one earlier column, but too briefly, so I thought I ought to return to it here. (albeit, still too briefly). All kinds of stuff is in it, including frequent first-rate photographs of Italian landscapes (and cityscapes), Anny’s own writings and (more often) texts she’s found elsewhere, like the one she describes as “a good article on Gary Snyder in the Guardian Unlimited sent by Jeff Newberry to the New Poetry List” from which she extracted the following two paragraphs: “Snyder points out that the San Francisco poetry renaissance was already advanced, in the work of Rexroth, Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer and others, before the subversive Ginsberg gang arrived from the east coast: ‘They just publicised it.’
“The last letters Snyder received from Kerouac, who died in a broken-down state in 1969, were ranting and insulting, but Snyder remains affectionate towards the man who mythologised him in a cult novel before he reached the age of 30. ‘Jack was a dedicated person. As a Buddhist he had some very good insights. It was all mixed up with his French-Canadian Roman Catholicism, but so what? It’s hard to know why people self-destruct. They do so for reasons of deep and ancient karma, qualities of their character they were born with.’”
Tom Beckett, by the way, interviews Anny at http://willtoexchange.blogspot.com/2006/05/interview-with-anny-ballardini.html. Beckett’s E-X-C-H-A-N-G-E-V-A-L-U-E-S, which has more than a dozen excellent interviews of poets by Tom and other poets, is an excellent poetry resource.
Another blogger who sprinkles his blog (Ursprach) with quotations from others, although posting his own thoughts, too, is James Finnegan. I generally find them a pleasure to disagree with. Here’s one of his own sayings: “A poem of concept is generally lesser in the weight than a poem of content.” For me, the best poetry is substantially both conceptual and . . . contentual. I strongly sympathize with Finnegan’s contention in one of his entries that because “The acoustic effects of language are dismal compared to those of music . . . no one is much interested in words devoid of their meanings”–but he’s wrong that few are interested in asemic texts, as they’re called, by their many makers.
Halvard Johnson, whom I consider an intellectual nihilist (because, among other things, he seems–entirely uncombatively–to believe that all texts are equally valuable) is one who would defend “words devoid of their meanings.” Nevertheless, his own poetry at his Entropy and Me blog is only a mite loopy, not asemic, as in his:
Sonnet for the New Year
Pleistocene campfires flickering in the distance, deeply
rooted slogans chat it up with money barons. Medical
malpractice suits us just fine, thank you very much.
For instance, well-delivered apologies salve all wounds.
Partial reconciliations break step when crossing a bridge,
miraculous transformations no longer expected or offered.
Higher disease rates unrelated to education or health costs
speak volumes to our well-tuned ears. Biology urges us
to seek out music in the company of other people. Yahweh
and other loud cellphone talkers gather to break bread to-
gether, airwaves atremble with salutations, with greetings.
On everyone’s lips, prospects for reelection, for theatrical
productions that do not close in a month or less. And soon,
all spats aside, someone texts us a toast, and all follow suit.
Jeff Newberry’s blog is a good place to go to get an idea of what conventional thirty- something poets are doing and thinking. Here’s a musing of his from one of his entries: “In between midnight feedings, I’ve been rereading John Donne, a poet whose work I’ve always admired, from the very first time I read ‘Batter My Heart, Three-Personed God.’ Lately, I’ve been going through Donne’s early love poetry and have been wondering why on earth I didn’t take him as a model back when I was writing angsty She-doesn’t-love-me poetry. Donne’s early work manages to make a pleading & pitiful persona (a whiney, unrequited lover) quite compelling. His skillful handling of metaphor and his witty word play are the key here.”
The final blog I have room to say anthing about is Tad Richards’s Opus 40. It’s a fun blog containing Tad’s deft caricatures of contemporary poets, fine photographs, his own poems, and news items like one about the American Academy of Poets’ new website feature, Poetry Map, which shows the states with all kinds of poetry resources and local poetry- related landmarks, poetry event sites, and the like labeled. But, Richards complains, “Marvin Bell is not listed in Iowa, and his importance to the state (he’s an ex-poet laureate) and to the Iowa Workshop cannot be overstated.”
The map of New Mexico’s overlooking long-time state resident, Witter Bynner, gives him an excuse to quote a poem of Bynner’s:
I COME AND GO
I come and go
And never stay.
I pick and choose
A night, a day,
I find, I lose,
I laugh along,
I will not know
Right things from wrong.
I pity those
Who pity me,
I ask no boon,
But being free . . .
And so the moon,
My polished stone,
Shines and shows
I lie alone.
Too bad about Witter’s not being on the map, but I feel confident that at least a hundred American poets more than twice as good as he aren’t on it, either. And with that slam of the American Poetry Establishment, I close. Content.