I was saying to Irina Moga in a recent post-related discussion that a course curriculum could probably be generated from the people, writings, publications & general discussions posted online. Her own discussions of French writings (contemporary and classical), music, opera and Canadian poets are good examples. I think I'd like to try putting this idea to the test here. And I wonder if by purposely 'attending to' poetry-related information that comes my way anything qualitatively like it, say a significant self-evolving work, can arise from it. A textual figure from the ground.
There is no greater, more immediately accessible, source of significant content than the blogosphere (and I draw a purposeful distinction between the blog and Internet in general). I certainly take exception to any characterization of the blogosphere as the source of sloppy, unedited and generally uninteresting writing. No less a literary personage than Jerome Rothenberg has celebrated the blog as the arena "of a free circulation of works (poems and poetics in the present instance) outside of any commercial or academic nexus...in the tradition of autonomous publication by poets, going back to Blake and Whitman and Dickinson, among numerous others." My own experiences have borne out Rothenberg's intuitions. I use the term "blognoscenti" to refer to bloggers or blog visitors from whom I've acquired vital (cultural, artistic) information about and/or insight into poetry.
Every item of particular interest I receive from the bloggers with whom I've most often conversed over the past year, and whom I've acknowledged in my recent "year in review" post, will be duly noted. I will acknowledge them as primary authors & sources, to be given pride of place. Information will also be drawn from other sites deemed too good to pass up. Later in the process, either at various points over the next several months or once near the end of 2011, I will try to construct from it (perhaps along the lines of a Jackson Mac Low-type "chance operation" or by other more author-directed methods to be determined) a document of some sort, or the preliminary sketches of one: for example an "Intro to Blog Poetry & Poetics" 101; or perhaps the outline of an evolving theory of cyberlanguage or primer on blogger poetics or literary manifesto, etc etc. I believe the open-endedness of Net technology, though providing a steady stream of content, may even eventually result in a larger, more focused work itself.
I'll give blognoscenti offerings, beginning now at 02 January, 2011 as often as they appear to me—hopefully on a daily basis—either here or at their source site, even citing interesting detail communicated through blog rolls, links or email correspondence. Nothing of a personal or confidential nature will ever be disclosed. I'll continue building my blog data from all the blognoscenti sources (until, of course, any one of them ask that I no longer reference his or her blog).
Any technical or literary terms will be boldfaced (leaving other boldfaced words that appear in the original source untouched).
The words 'poet', 'poetry' or names of poets or names for any type of poetry genre, style, movement or technique or any language suggestive of poetry must appear in each blog citation.
(a) 02 January 2011. Mark Smith, "Review of Contemporary Haibun 11" in Haibun Today: A Quarterly Journal. "One striking example of expanding the haiga genre is Ed Baker’s “butterfly in her garden.” Baker uses a traditional hand-drawn sketch and handwritten haiku, but the image of the nude woman straddling the stringed instrument while holding a flower is an almost illogical compliment to the elegant haiku ('butterfly/in her garden/playing with/a flower')";
(b) Andreas Gripp (in email correspondence) referred to "Recent Reviews of Anathema: Poems Selected and New and Reader Comments on the Poetry of Andreas Gripp [by myself and Katherine L. Gordon]" in andreasgripp.com. "Anathema also addresses the daring of this poet to visit emotional corners that most contemporaries avoid. Andreas Gripp's special signature, as an exciting modern poet, is to lead you trembling into terrible truths: a book of loss exquisitely delineated by the knife of the poet's language";
(c) Irina Moga, "The year in review: what I'm not going to say & do, and people I'd like to mention" in Word-Dreamer: poetics (comments section). The source of the Margaret Atwood quote (“A word after a word/after a word is power”) is "from Ms. Atwood's Spelling poem";
(d) Geof Huth, "The Texts of Your Life" in dbqp: visualizing poetics. A review of 60 Textos [textual poetry] by Sarah Riggs. "For these are books written in and of the world, during the regular process of living, poems written in the same way a breath is taken: naturally, normally, sitting down, standing, walking, while looking and hearing and being. These are all poems texted from Riggs' blue Nokia cellphone to her friend Omar Berrada's silver Samsung cellphone";
(e) Joseph Hutchison, "In a Bleak Year-End Mood, the Poet Tips His Hat to a 16th Century Colleague" in The Perpetual Bird. "A Litany for the Wheeling Year" by Thomas Nashe. "Again a grim old year is turning./Again the fires of war are burning."Sentence: A butterfly, nude and flower, traditional signatures of the poet's language, do more than say: they live, walk, hear & have being (like fires of war).
6 comments:
there is
noh-thing
illogical about it
&if anyboddhi
knows
'twould be Eye
K.
or
maybe
Gee Ache
I ordered a copy
in a plain-brown-wrappher
(just in case)
as
I don't re:member Ed's
piece
hey
this is fun..
you open me to Gripp who is new to me
(which I will revisit more to)
but i did just get to his September 11
poem
& wlll
I got a story for you! It regards working Wild Orchid with Fay (notice when it was published) and being at her place in TRIBECA ....
K.
Conrad,
This sounds like a novel and interesting idea!
Hi Irina
let's see where it goes. I've always wanted to try quantifying all the bits of significant detail about poetry that passes (albeit nomadically at times) through my blog, seeing if anything like a developing idea can take shape. Keeping a record of it all might amount to something like a blog-textbook. Interesting, interesting...
And it's going to be a lot of fun, too.
This is a fine idea! Better than dropping an occasional link. I.e., it provides a kind of focus that random blogging doesn't—unless you're a brilliant blogger like John Latta or Tom Clark or William Michaelian. I couldn't bring it off, but I know you can!
Oh—and the word verification for my comment is "unart." Believe it or not....
Thanks, Joseph
I guess it's my way of disproving Jodi Dean's thesis that blogging is a vicious capitalist-controlled feedback cycle that amounts to little more than personal enslavement to technology.
The combined expertise, talent out there in the blogosphere could easily turn into volumes of first-rate publications. I'm just wondering what an outline of a potential 'work' or at least course syllabus would look like if I noted every interesting 'fact' to come my way here.
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