Recently in Blog Culture Category

Here's an excellent blog I just found: Safe Digression. The blog describes itself as a convergence of poetry and technology; sure enough, it's use of podcasting is cutting edge. That's how I found Safe Digression--by looking for poetry blogs with podcasting to get ideas for something similar here at Muddy Bank. Safe Digression has three podcasts a week, the latest one being a reading of Philip Levine's poem "Two." You'll need an iPod to hear it.

That blog thread on TechRhet has led to some interesting blogging about the value of blogs in the writing classroom. Here's a description of a class blog on Dr. B.'s Blog. I'm not sure, however, if the class blog is really no more than a discussion board, which could just as easily be done using good, open access discussion board scripts; phpBB, for example. In other words, I don't think everything created by blogging software is in fact a blog. I don't think a space where students write their thoughts or comment on others' thoughts is a blog. Seems to me that blogging software has been used to create a discussion board. That's fine. Maybe it's easier to use blogware to set up a discussion board. But a blog, whatever it is, is not a discussion board.

I just finished reading at TechRhet an overly long thread about blogs. My reaction to the thread is nicely summed up by Jenny Edbauer in this post of hers. There's a crowd at TechRhet who push blogs as the next big thing that will make everyone a great writer. Maybe that's not what they're saying but that blogs will make writing more enjoyable. Or maybe they're saying a combination of the two. In any case there's a bunch of meta talk about blogs, just as there was with the emergence of personal computers, graphic user interfaces, word processors, listservs, networked writing environments, the WWW, Dreamweaver, MOOs, MUDs, blogs, just about every new technology except Instant Messaging, and most of what I've read there says IM is the next big evil influence on writing. Go figure.

Here's the Electronic Poetry Center Blog List from SUNY--Buffalo. It's one of the best lists I've found. Now to read all of them!

Looking at 2River's referrer log, I came across Blogging News : Blog Index : BLOGNDX, which lists 2River as a Blog Highlight. Go figure.

Now seems to be a good time to add your poetry blog to Google's sponsored links. I just googled poetry blog, and of the 1,430,000 results, the blog kept by Talent Hizashi Yamasaki stood out. It's the only one listed under Sponsored Links. Smart guy!

I only wish Yamasaki lived up to the promise of his Google description: "Revolutionary Postmodern Poet." "The Test of the World," for instance, has some stunning lines, but seems to me even a postmodern poem should make some sense. It seems the images of the poem should have some adherence. In the first stanza I think there's some mixing of electrical imagery. "The text of the world" is plugged and the speaker's throat is throwing off sparks, but the electrical witness swallows the spark. Well, maybe there is some sort of adherence. Everything is electric!

One of the exciting things about blogging is that writers such as Yamasaki can use it for personal publishing. Just as writers learned HTML or WYSISWYG website software to publish their own work, other writers are now using blogs to do the same. The difference is that using blogs is much easier than marking text with HTML.

The technology just keeps getting easier, and with that easy ease I think will come a further proliferation of self publishing, some of which will probably be quite good, even excellent, but a lot which will be vanity writing.

I've just returned from a conference in San Antonio for writing teachers. The River Walk is a good tourist spot. Lots of places to eat. Fairly good Mexican food. Great margaritas at the Original Mexican Restuarant. The shrine of Texas independence, The Alamo, was a sad sight, however. Hotels engulf it, and the grounds were covered with garish tents for 1600 guests who were there to celebrate the movie release of The Alamo. I simply don't think there's much to bring a visitor back.

The conference also had it's ups and downs. I went to a couple of sessions where the presenters had been depending upon technology but for one reason or another there were technological breakdowns. Rather than falling back on Plan B they expected the audience to understand shit at times happens even with technology. Sure it does; that's why you have a Plan B. Another let down was that I arrived late for the Friday night poetry reading. I got there and the room was empty.

Throughout the conference I went to several sessions on blogging. I'm not convinced, however, the presenters who claimed to be blogging are actually blogging. They're using blogging software, their students use blogging software, but I'm not convinced that using the software is the same as blogging. For example, does posting writing prompts for students constitute blogging? Are students blogging when they use blogging software to write to those prompts?

Friday night I went to a special interest group meeting, Academic Blogging, where I met someone who actually knew of 2River. That was exciting.

I've said before how difficult it is to find a blog with intelligent talk about poetry. Well, I just found one: One Good Bumblebee. The writer's from Texas, a soon to be graduate, who hopes to go to grad school for an MFA. Good luck! But I hope she maintains her blog.

What I like about the blog is that the entries remind me of what it was like to be young with dreams of making it big in the world of poetry. There are entries about the pain of rejection, there are transcripts of chats about the author's intention in a poem. There are poems, too, but the blog doesn't seem self-serving but instead like a space where the writer is working to articulate her life as a poet.

It's clear now that I'm stuck on sex tonight. Was just thumbing through some previous blogs from Richard, back to the beginning of this web log, in March 2003. Found there Richard's idea that someone should record his poems, drafts and all, for all to see, on this thing called "Wiki." (He provides the link.) Now, there's an interesting idea--not only to unzip but to toy with it MTV style. Actually, I agree, it would be a beautiful thing to see a poem become.

Anyway, here's the sex part. I tried the link and was taken to this Wiki site (I am new to this stuff), where I clicked on "What's Wiki." And here is the definition I get:

"Wiki is a piece of server software that allows users to freely create and edit Web page content using any Web browser. Wiki supports hyperlinks and has a simple text syntax for creating new pages and crosslinks between internal pages on the fly."

What? Laugh at me if you will. But the underlying theme here is "Hey, it's easy as pie to use this thing!" Delivered in the most sexless techno-jargon I can imagine.

Struggling the past couple of weeks deciding whether to write in blog or in the more traditional journal, with pen and ink. I've kept a journal for almost twenty-five years. Now, with access to this blog, I feel some pull both ways . . . but what does that mean, both ways? Tonight, I want to think about the private journal.

Supposing one keeps a journal that nobody ever reads? This ought to make it, then, not so much a journal as a diary. Dear diary. The diary, as a cultural phenomenon, contains all sorts of pablum and splash: emotional outburst, self-pity, whining, narcissism, shallow self-analyses, shallow analyses of others, the day's weather. It's a record of the worst of one's character & discipline. A site of delerious masturbation!

Now suppose that you save everything you write, every spiral-bound, thin-ruled volume. This says maybe your work isn't so private after all. The voyeur, perhaps some niece or grand-nephew one day, or a graduate student in anthropology, is invited. When the mark is made, the word inscribed, the voyeur is sent his invitation. But not for tonight. Maybe when you are dead, maybe long dead. (But you toy lasciviously with the notion that you will one day be exposed!) There is so much of the posthumous about writing: the breath preserved.

Now, here's one immediate difference between the saved private journal and the blog: delay. Delay has its effects, structurally, upon thought. It makes sex furtive and delectable and unreal. (Something to note for later consideration: my response to the Web--emails, chat rooms, discussion groups, instant messaging, now blogging--even when I participate only as voyeur, is squeamishness.) If you write something about yourself in your private journal in, say 1987, that you return to read in 1999, who is that later person? The most intimate of voyeurs. Writing anything, there, knowing that one day "you" may return for a peek at your old self (two selves so very private that there are no mediating readers, no "public"), you are Narcissus.

But there is no knowing the later self until it returns, prodigally, to the site of the earlier self. And therein lies the beauty and the distaste of the self-written text. Barthes: "Text of bliss: the text that imposes a state of loss, the text that discomforts (perhaps to the point of a certain boredom), unsettles the reader's historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of his tastes, values, memories, brings to a crisis his relation with language." Even one's own handwriting has changed over time, as often as one's one. (Has anyone ever studied this phenomenon among writers?)

So there you have it, the most private of texts, the personal journal never shared with anyone but one's potential self, in a way writes that self into existence. And one comes back to it as the Prodigal Son. How impossible this is with blogging!