Blogs are a great promotional tool, I have a series of writing workshops coming up that i was asked to give after an environmental organisation in town stumbled on my blog. Plus my first payment for writing came through blogging contacts.

badly written formal poetry is much more obviously bad than badly written free verse.

Yes, but it’s also a lot more fun, don’t you think?

Jo – Well, I used to share some of those negative reactions, in part because the confessional style seemed to excuse much sloppiness, as Juliet says. But Alicia Suskin Ostriker’s Stealing the Language broadened my perspective considerably: one of the few absolutely essential volumes of criticism on modern poetry.

Paul Squires – I agree; it would be nice to make money. But I enjoy giving stuff away, too, of course. Print-on-demand self-publishing, via Lulu.com or similar outfits, may be part of the answer. Most publishers offer 15% royalties at best, so if you’re any good at marketing yourself, you can make a lot more money self-publishing.

And blogs are a great promotional tool, presuming you’re willing to network properly. Patry Francis’s success with The Liar’s Diary offers an excellent lesson in how to combine blogging and online networking with a traditional publisher’s marketing strategy.

I always thought you and Joe were old friends, though – I don’t realize you met through blogging! A very fruitful encounter, then.

CGP – Yes, and community for poetry bloggers can turn into a gentle sort of workshopping, too, can’t it? Though I gather there are places online where one can get more unsparing critiques of one’s writing if that’s what one is after.

As for the attitude toward personal blogging, let’s remember that there are a lot of poetry critics who don’t care for the confessional style in poetry, either, regardless of how many fans it attracts. Some of that stems from sexism, I think, since the genre is dominated by women, and/or snobbery: the notion that the personal is trivial by definition unless it concerns itself with weighty issues of life and death and Man’s Search for Meaning.

I can understand why people just dismiss blogging if all they know of it is the personal diary type of blog (not that i think that type of blog is bad but i can see why it doesn’t come across well)

I like to think that my blog is well put together and can be seen as a package where everything is serving the same function. But I know that people who don’t like all the aspects of it (poetry, craft, environment, reviews) may be put off reading the whole thing.

Not much to add, except rather irrelevantly and not very cleverly that I found Joe Hyam while googling for pink onions, and another friend who I e-mail with as well as blogging exchanges while looking for the words of a song, so search engine searches do yield readers sometimes.