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16 May 2005: I'm a member of the Poetics Internet Discussion Group (listserv?), founded by Charles Bernstein and connected to SUNY, Buffalo, but visit it infrequently because poetics is rarely, and politics too unrarely, discussed there. Over a week ago, I posted a request for help with my Cummings presentation to it. Thoughts about his effect on language poetry were what I was hoping for, the place being rife with language poets. Only one person responded, a young poet drawn to Cummings, I suspect, not for his poetics but for his sentimentalities. In any case, she never sent me any of the Cummings-influenced poems she said she'd written after I emphasized I was after poems using his techniques more than poems inspired by his point of view on life.
This morning, I checked the site to see if anyone else had posted on Cummings. No. But there was a thread about blogs under the title of "Are Blogs Solipsistic?" or something close to that. I had trouble following the thread--couldn't be sure who was saying what. But the question intrigues me. First reaction: sure, blogs are solipsistic, but no more than any writing not part of a dialogue with one or more other writers is. On the other hand, this blog is awfully close to solipsism since just about no one reads it but I. My "defense?" I use quotation marks because I don't think a defense is called for. My blog gives me pleasure to do (enough of the time), so I do it. From a strictly utilitarian and there much less important point of view, it helps me order my thoughts, explore new thoughts, perfect my expression, keep in shape as a writer, vent. It matters not if even no one including me reads it.
I will admit, however, that I hope others do read it, and believe the fact at few or none do does not mean none ever will. In fact, part of the reason I blog is my hope that it will allow the BigWorld to discover my Great Wisdom. Blogging's greatest benefit is its ability to give writers a route to the public that bypasses editors, peer groups and like retardants-of-culture.
While writing about the Poetics Site, I might as well growl, too, about an idiotic opinion someone voiced in the thread there about blogs--or voiced his opposition to. This won't be the first time I've growled about it, alas. It is that a poet can't write valid criticism of others' poetry at a blog (or anywhere else, it follows) because he is consciously or unconsciously a competitior of all other poets. Sure, in some sense all poets compete with each other. So what? What a poet says as a critic will stand or fall in accordance with what he says as a critic. His reasons for saying it are irrelevant. Read him and evaluate him on the persuasiveness of his case, which will depend on his logic and examples, nothing else.
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