Blog Culture: April 2004 Archives

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.