Rhetoric / Composition: December 2003 Archives

Ron Sillman writes this in Silliman's Blog:

One of the values of blogging for poets is that it can deepen the degree of critical thinking poets themselves do, more so I suspect than the scatter of listserv discussions. If there is a bias hidden in the blogging form, it's toward poets who think critically, but that by no means ensures that said poets will be post-avant, let alone any particular flavor thereof.

No telling what he means by "post-avant" but his point about using the blog to think critically points to why I'm working my way into blogging: I just want a way to push my thinking about reading, writing, and publishing poetry. It's easy to say writing assists thinking but it's hard to get into the habit of writing to think. A blog seems to be a technology that help us all get into the writing to think habit.

But where to start with "post avant." Almost sounds like savant.

This interesting article from the BBC about spam being put to literary use. Some spammers are trying to sneak their mail through filters by including text from out-of-copyright books. Some recipients of spam are snipping lines and subject headings for use in poems.