Poetry-Blogging, a Primer

This entry is part 7 of 20 in the series Poetics and technology

 

When sharing poems on the internet,
it is important not to consider an audience
of square dancers and nudists but to focus instead
on less “mainstream” readers: the tracing-paper
addicts and chronic organ grinders.

The latter are especially unreasonable and will offer
poetry critique at inappropriate times, such as when
they want to feel better about their own shoddy
attempts at plastic surgery.

Password protection of poems offers a sense of security,
although a misguided emphasis on the sanctity
of toadstools and juke boxes prevents poets
from enjoying steady employment.

Everyone knows the point of sharing poems
on the internet is to keep them hidden away
like secret regrets. Yet we find that the more
we behave like flashers, the more we have to spend
on trench coats.

Likewise, our public invitations to square dances
and raves, though almost universally rejected,
are still our only chance at being rubbed all over
other people’s hair, causing it to stand on end.

This brings us to copyright issues. The ownership
of a poem, like the ownership of a washing machine
or cat, is pretty simple: Just slap an ID tag on it
and you’re good to go — or so we thought.

As it turns out, in the murky world of the internet,
your “cat,” however “cat-like” it may appear,
might yet turn out to be a washing machine.
How will you know what to do with it?

Do you open its mouth and fill it with Tide,
or do you take another route and stop washing
your clothes altogether? Soiled shirts
will definitely make you look like a poet.

The phenomenon of poetic recognition is crucial
to a sense of online community. Waking up one day
and realizing three or four people know your name
is akin spotting a UFO: You know it’s real, but you
can’t lay your hands on the evidence.

This is why poet-bloggers turn to their oracles,
Statcounter and Google Alert, neither of which
need be consulted more than 400 times a day.
Every page view produces a sensation similar
to sliding along a Slip-n-Slide covered in baby oil.

Toxicologists fret about enthusiastic bloggers’ tendency
to lick their monitors until the words smear. The aftermath
can be measured in parts per million: How many
poets’ nouns must bleed into the verbs of casual readers
before this behavior is seen as a public health risk?

—Nathan Moore and Dana Guthrie Martin

* * *

Dana Guthrie Martin and Nathan Moore blog at My Gorgeous Somewhere and Exhaust Fumes and French Fries, and co-edited an issue of qarrtsiluni, Mutating the Signature.

Earlier in this series, British writer Dick Jones also tackled the subject of blogging and poetry, in case you missed it: “Poetry in the Ether.”

—Dave

“Tempations of Solitude” series now half as solitary

This entry is part 10 of 12 in the series The Temptations of Solitude

 

I’m very pleased to announce that my “Temptations of Solitude” poems now appear side-by-side with the paintings that inspired them on the artist’s own website. Though we’ve become regular email corespondents, I barely knew Clive Hicks-Jenkins when I started writing this series last spring, and was blown away by his enthusiasm for the poems. After all, he’s a fairly major figure in British painting, and it’s not as if I was the first to write poems in response to his works. In fact, I’ve joined a small online exhibit which includes five other poets (click on their names to view their pages on the site). I am particularly pleased to be published alongside my friend Marly Youmans and the wonderful Callum James.

I put these poems into the proverbial (and wholly suppositional) bottom drawer for many months, but didn’t end up making more than a few, minor changes when I finally took another look at them. This should probably worry me more than it does. I used to be such a perfectionist! Then I discovered blogging, and realized I was only as good a writer as my next post. Some of the poems in the Temptations series are stronger than others, and I’m O.K. with that. You can’t hit a home run every time, you know? I’ve decided there’s value in unevenness, and that if you attempt to reach the same peak each time, you end up with a featureless plateau.

At any rate, thanks to Clive for the inclusion — and for creating such damn fine paintings in the first place.

“Hordes heretofore unrealized”

Descent of Man: I’ve always loved that expression, despite the sexism, blending as it does the study of evolution with an old-fashioned way of envisioning ancestry, which is all too often erroneously imagined as some sort of upward climb. In fact, evolution has nothing to do with progress.

What’s more, we did literally descend from the trees. And according to the discoverers of the latest addition to our ancestral tree, Ardipithecus ramidus, our upright posture — something traditionally seen as distinctly modern — had already begun to evolve when we were still mainly arboreal. The knuckle-walking associated with our closest relatives, chimpanzees and gorillas, appears to be a more recent adaptation, which has two implications:

  • The popular graphic representation of human evolution, showing an apelike figure gradually straightening up, is completely wrong.
  • Though evolution does not represent progress, some lineages have undergone more of it than others. By this standard, gorillas and chimpanzees seem now to be more highly evolved than humans.

These findings make me ridiculously happy. The oldest australopithecine fossils had already suggested that arboreal habits persisted far longer than had previously been thought; we were creatures of the forest until just a few million years ago. Even if Ardipithecus ramidus ultimately turns out not to have been a direct ancestor of our particular branch, it does further bolster the case for a relatively recent Descent of Man. And it puts me in mind of one of my favorite passages from William Carlos Williams’ great poem Paterson:

The descent beckons
as the ascent beckoned.
Memory is a kind
of accomplishment,
a sort of renewal
even
an initiation, since the spaces it opens are new places
inhabited by hordes
heretofore unrealized,
of new kinds—
since their movements
are toward new objectives
(even though formerly they were abandoned). …

*

For more on human connections with trees, visit the latest Festival of the Trees, the blog carnival for all things arboreal, at local ecologist.

SEO for poetry, poems, poets

This entry is part 5 of 20 in the series Poetics and technology

 

I don’t spend much time looking at site stats. Oh, I glance at them pretty often, but I rarely pore over them to see which posts are the most popular, who’s arriving from where, and the like. Only yesterday did it even occur to me to see what kind of statistics my blog host offers, and I’ve been with them since last March. Otherwise, I rely exclusively on the very minimal statistics provided by a WordPress plugin identical to what’s used on WordPress.com. Its main virtue as far as I’m concerned is that it doesn’t slow load-times down at all, since it doesn’t require the installation of javascript. But I also like the fact that it doesn’t tempt me to waste time looking at lots of additional information of marginal utility, as I used to do when I relied on StatCounter.com.

That said, my vanity was piqued earlier today when I took a rare, detailed look at the most popular searches that led people to my blog. Via Negativa is now the #1 result in Google for penis poetry, #2 for penis poems, #8 for penis poem, and #3 for poems about penis. (You might have to turn “safe search” off to verify these results at home.) In the non-phallic category, Via Negativa comes in at #8 for poems about movies, #1 for viking nicknames, #1 for balm of Gilead tree, and #3 for raccoon sex.

There’s a depressingly clear pattern emerging from all these inadvertently search engine-optimized (SEO) posts. All include the search term right in the title of the post: “The penis poems.” “Poems about movies.” Viking nicknames.” “Felling the balm of Gilead.” “Hot raccoon sex.”

The SEO experts are right: if you want Google juice, pander to the bots with titles only a robot could love. For example, if you want to blog a poem about giving birth, title the post “poem about giving birth,” and save the actual title for the next line. (You could always enclose it in h1 or h2 tags, if you still want to make sure it’s indexed.) I mean, I’m probably not going to change my ways anytime soon, but don’t let my stick-in-the-mud example deter you from deploying titles like the one I used for this post. (If there’s one thing guaranteed to get lots of searches, it’s a blog post about SEO.)

But please keep things in perspective. Even my most Google-friendly poems have yet to garner more than a couple thousand page views total in the 17 months since I started using WordPress.com stats. Blogging poetry may be a much better way to reach audiences than through traditional publication in print journals, but that’s relative: poetry blogs will still never attract a fraction of the readership of, say, knitting blogs, mommy blogs, or (lord help us) political opinion blogs. And sadly, it seems that only a vanishingly small percentage of those who go online every day in search of information about the human male sex organs say to themselves, “Hey! I wonder if there are any really good poems about it?”

Micropoetry in the West: a brief survey

Mention micropoetry to most people, and naturally they think you’re talking about haiku. In fact, a 31-syllable tanka also fits snugly into a 140-character post on Twitter, Identica, or similar micromessaging services. But I’ve been compiling a list of other, mostly Western models that Twitter poets might derive inspiration from as well.

1. Fragments of Sappho. Of course, they weren’t written as fragments, but the fact that we consider even the shortest ones worth translating multiple times surely says something about their lasting value, millennia after they were transcribed onto sadly fragile papyrus leaves. Examples include:

I will let my body
flow like water over the gentle cushions.
(Jim Powell, trans.)

For me
neither the honey
nor the bee.
(Powell)

And the famous

I don’t know what to do. I am of two minds.
(various)

2. Biblical one-liners (mashal and hidah). Scholar James Kugel repeatedly cautioned that talking about “poetry” and “prose” in reference to Biblical texts was misleading. But his volume The Great Poems of the Bible: A Reader’s Companion with New Translations is an excellent introduction to ancient Jewish lyricism, however we choose to categorize it. He shows how “the short, pungent, two-part sentence” is the basic building block of biblical prophecy and poetry alike, and how the wisdom books are especially rich in examples of what Kugel called “the one-line poem”:

The north wind gives birth to rain, and secret speech to an angry face.

Like the sound of thorns under a pot, so is the speech of fools.

If a tree falls to the north or to the south, wherever it falls, there it is.

3. The Greek Anthology. Many of the poems in this ancient compendium wouldn’t have fit into a tweet, but some of the most memorable would have:

The lines are cast and the nets are set and waiting.
Now the tunnies come, slipping through the moonlit water.
—The Delphic Oracle (Kenneth Rexroth)

Stranger, tell the Lakedaemonians that we lie here awaiting their orders.
—Anonymous (various)

This man: this no-thing: vile: this brutish slave:
This man is beloved, and rules another’s soul.
—Bianor (Dudley Fitts)

The moon has set,
And the Pleiades. It is
Midnight. Time passes.
I sleep alone.
—Anonymous, sometimes attributed to Sappho (Rexroth)

4. Epigrams of Martial. I know these mainly from William Matthews’ translation, The Mortal City. A few make the 140-character cut, at least in the original Latin. With his abundant, snarky wit, Martial would’ve ruled the Twitter roost.

What good is my farm, and what are its yields?
I can’t see you from any of its fields.

*

Once a doctor, now an undertaker,
he’s still got the same old bedside manner.

*

Anger suits the rich as a sort of thrift—
hatred’s cheaper than the meanest gift.

*

Brevity is good, the couplet-maker hopes. But look:
What good is brevity if it fills up a book?

5. Mexican dichos (and other proverb traditions). This was the subject of one of my very earliest blog posts, in which I quoted from Folk Wisdom of Mexico, by Jeff Sellers. The one I thought most poetic was Cada quien puede hacer de sus calzones un palote — “Anyone is entitled to make a kite out of his pants.”

Of course, many other folk proverbs from around the world are equally poetic. I think of West Africa as a region where the popularity and abundance of proverbs paradoxically helps nourish one of the world’s last flourishing oral epic traditions.

6. Limericks. I’ll just quote the Wikipedia here:

Gershon Legman, who compiled the largest and most scholarly anthology, held that the true limerick as a folk form is always obscene, and cites similar opinions by Arnold Bennett and George Bernard Shaw, describing the clean limerick as a periodic fad and object of magazine contests, rarely rising above mediocrity. From a folkloric point of view, the form is essentially transgressive; violation of taboo is part of its function.

7. Blues. Years ago I read a number of scholarly books on the blues, and the two best treatments of blues as lyrics that I found were Paul Oliver’s The Meaning of the Blues (issued in Britain under the title Blues Fell this Morning) and Big Road Blues by David Evans. Evans talked about how blues composition differs from the way songs are passed down in European folk tradition. Bluesmen and women were on the whole improvisors, with repertoires of song-kernals in which one or two verses had become associated with a given tune, the rest of the verses to be added as inspiration and the length of the performance dictated. As any fan of the traditional country blues can tell you, variants of individual verses can pop up in any number of different songs, and depending on the song, the first line of a verse may be repeated once, twice, or not at all. So in its semi-autonomy and two-part structure the blues verse resembles the two-part utterance of ancient Biblical prose-poetry, though I think its origins were much more immediate: in the call-and-response pattern of field hollers and other work songs.

I never missed my water, till my well run dry.
I never missed my rider till the day she said goodbye.

*

She brought me coffee, and she brought me tea.
She brought me everything but the lowdown jailhouse key.

*

Took my baby to meet the morning train,
and the blues came down, baby, like showers of rain.

*

I’m gonna lean my head on some lonesome railroad iron.
I’m gonna let one of those big 18 hundreds pacify my mind.

8. Modern Western poetry is replete with examples of very short lyric verse. One thinks of Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro,” the proverbs and song verses of Antonio Machado, and the monochords of Yannis Ritsos. An essential collection — and one of my favorite poetry anthologies in general — is Poetry Brief: An Anthology of Short, Short Poems, by William Cole. A slimmer anthology by Robert Bly, however, contains a much higher proportion of poems that would pass the Twitter test: The Sea and the Honeycomb: A Book of Tiny Poems. Here’s Bly’s translation of a poem by Apollinaire, “The Fly”:

Our flies know all the tunes
They learned from the flies in Norway—
Those shaman flies that are
The divinities of the snow.

And here’s one from Poetry Brief in the spirit of Martial and the Greek Anthology: “Ezra,” by Lawrence Durrell.

Ci-git Ezra
Who knew ten languages
  But could not choose
When writing English poetry
  Which to use.

Admonition


Video link (RSS subscribers must click through)

There’s also an accompanying image at my photoblog. I’m not sure what the species is here, nor why they’re attracted to this bucket in which brushes covered with latex house paint have been cleaned out. If anyone can enlighten me on either score, please leave a comment.

This was shot with my regular digital camera (in the heat of the moment I forgot I had a camcorder), then speeded up to about twice the actual speed. I extracted, cleaned up, and selected a portion of the audio track — annual cicadas in full whine — to combine with my recitation. I dashed off the poem under the influence of alcohol for authenticity’s sake. Here it is, for the benefit of those on dial-up:

This is no moon, my poet friends.

Those are no crickets.

That cloying scent doesn’t come from a flower.

Whatever you’re trying to quench, it isn’t thirst.

Lacewing

green lacewing

This lacewing may be experiencing a teachable moment. I know I was: up late dreading poetry, I suddenly realized I was dreading over someone else’s shoulder. It must’ve come in through a hole in the screen door, and perhaps thought — erroneously, of course — that the computer screen was another way out.

Green lacewings are as sensitive as they look. Their hearing is so acute that some species can even pick up bats’ sonar, whereupon they fold their wings and plummet to the ground to avoid capture. They communicate through subtle vibrations of the body, especially during courtship — inaudible “songs” unique to each species.

This was not always such a sensitive being, though. In its wild youth as an aphid-lion it ate any soft-bodied invertebrate in its path, and was even capable of resorting to cannibalism if no other food was handy. It had large sucking jaws with which to grasp its prey and inject stomach acid, turning the other’s insides into a Slurpee.

If you too are up late tonight, you might still have time to confess your poetic sins before “100% Honest Day” is over at Read Write Poem. Here’s what I wrote:

I have a deep-seated fear of unconscious plagiarism, to the point where I even suspect all my best lines and images to be stolen from someone else. One of the main reasons for my lack of enthusism for publishing my work anywhere other than my own blog is the fear that someone with an encyclopedic knowledge of modern poetry will discover my unwitting thefts. And even if I could know for sure that all my works are original, I would probably continue to feel at some level that I am an utter fraud as a poet. (I wonder if this is why so many of my fellow poets get MFAs?)

If I want to overcome this fear, I think I simply need to retrain my ears. Surely it can’t be too difficult to learn to distinguish one’s own unique vibrations from anybody else’s. My aphid-lion days are, after all, well behind me now.

Editor’s Lament

I gathered my thoughts in lieu
of other sustenance. They were
like craneflies to a phoebe:
mostly legs & wings.
I kept pausing to clear my throat.
I had no company but the stick
the stock the stack of unlovely poems.
And I who had been
such an awkward ugly kid,
I who knew nothing about the fine
points of grammar or literary theory,
marked them up with
a cheap ballpoint pen
and emailed rejection notes
to each of their hopeful authors:
Didn’t make it we’re sorry
best of luck in placing them
elsewhere…

I chewed as carefully as I could,
but one or two nevertheless
did not go gently. Ten hours later
there’s still a feeble fluttering
in the pit of my stomach.

Bizarre Pizarnik flick and other poetic diversions

From time to time, I motivate myself to do a translation of a Spanish-language video poem for Moving Poems. This morning’s effort was for an adaptation of a couple of pieces by Alejandra Pizarnik done in the style of a classic black-and-white horror film. Check it out.

*

My Identi.ca collaborator Patricia F. Anderson and I continue to work at our chain poem derived from news stories. I think it’s near completion.

*

The new Read Write Poem social network is really taking off, with 267 members, 6000-10,000 page views a day, and lively conversations proliferating in the groups and forums. I administer groups for Micropoetry, Video Poetry, and Politics and poetry, which is probably about all I can handle right now. Fortunately, lots of other people have been stepping forward, and the site now has 44 groups to choose from — everything from American Expatriates to New Formalism to LOLcat Poetry.

I’ve been a little surprised to find myself so active there; up until now, I’ve actively avoided involvement in discussions about writing and literature, which so easily become contentious. But so far, at least, the dominant tone at Read Write Poem has been enthusiasm rather than snark. And in another test of the expanded site’s success, the responses to the first weekly poetry prompt since the changeover have included a number of pretty impressive poems. I may never become a regular writer to prompts myself, but it’s great to see so many talented writers coming together across boundaries of distance, background, level of expertise, and stylistic approach. If you were thinking of applying for an MFA program somewhere, I’d advise you to save your money and join Read Write Poem instead.

A social network for poetry


Update: Read Write Poem ceased publication and dissolved its social network on May 1, 2010.

Back when I started this series, Dana Guthrie Martin volunteered to do a piece about sharing poetry on Facebook. Obviously she has yet to produce such an article. But instead, with the help of several friends, she’s done something far cooler: launch a Facebook alternative for poets and fans of poetry. I was one of about 15 testers for the site, which opened to the public at large yesterday: the new Read Write Poem. And based on what I’ve seen so far, I’d say there’s a good chance it will be a runaway success.

Up until Thursday, Read Write Poem had been a simple multi-author blog and weekly poetry prompt site, started by Dana in 2007 and managed for a year and a half by Deb Scott, who stays on as a member of the new managerial team. The prompts will continue, along with other great content and spin-offs, such as virtual book tours on members’ blogs and a podcast. (I’ve even volunteered to write a monthly column on topics similar to the ones I address in this series. We’re calling it “O Tech!”) But it’s the new back-end that really sets it apart.

Read Write Poem now runs on WordPress MU, the multi-user version of the blog platform, in order to take advantage of BuddyPress, “a suite of WordPress plugins and themes” designed “to let members socially interact.” BuddyPress is an official project of Automattic, the people behind WordPress.com who also comprise most of the lead developers for the open-source WordPress software, so it’s almost a sure bet that it will be around as long as WordPress itself. Dana and her technology guru Andre Tan looked at some other alternatives, such as Ning and Elgg, but ultimately decided that a BuddyPress set-up had the most flexibility for the kind of dual-purpose site they wanted. The website content is still at the front, as you’ll see, with the social network accessible via a new navigation bar at the top. The latest content from the network appears in the right-hand sidebar to help lure people in.

To me, this is a better approach than the usual social network style, which is to have one’s own activity stream take over for the index page as soon as one is logged in. I noticed that when I went to add a link to my browser bookmark bar yesterday, without really thinking about it I chose to bookmark the front page rather than my own profile page. I guess I like the tacit reminder that the site is about something bigger than just me and my network of friends and acquaintances. Facebook is still valuable because it lets me connect with virtually everyone and do some of the silly stuff I’ve never done much of at Via Negativa, such as pontificate about favorite music videos or participate in so-called memes. I can share links to poetry-related things (or whatever) with a much broader cross-section of people than just poets. But I’ve been using Facebook to connect with literary folks for close to two years now, and I can tell you that, for whatever reason, deep discussions rarely happen there. Almost all the groups I’ve joined are ghost towns — albeit ones that send out regular mailings to their members.

How does Read Write Poem compare with Facebook? The most glaring difference is the lack of a unified activity stream where I can follow all my friends’ posts to their profile pages — the equivalent of what Facebook calls status updates — in one place. Your only option for following friends at this time, short of visiting all their profiles, is to subscribe to their RSS feeds. And since most web users are unfortunately still in the dark about RSS, that’s not too good a solution. Though it’s somewhat hard to find at the moment, it turns out that there is a stream of one’s friends’ activity, similar to what’s in Facebook. Click on the “activity” link directly under the avatar on your personal page (I had thought that was merely an RSS feed link), and you can toggle between “just me” and “my friends” — and subscribe to either. [Thanks to Andre for the correction — see comments]

On the other hand Moreover, thanks to BuddyPress, Read Write Poem now has something that Facebook does not: forums. Some of these are free-standing and others are associated with groups. And if the last day and a half are any indication, the groups and forums are going to be the most active part of the site — which I feel is how it should be. Like a lot of writers and artists, I guess, I’m not a highly social person in real life because I’m not all that good at idle chit-chat, and because I’m rather zealously protective of my free time. Facebook, Twitter, etc. are fun, but what ultimately is the point? To me, the most interesting online social networks are those centered on specific hobbies or interests, such as Ravelry for knitters, Flickr for photographers, or Goodreads for book lovers. Long after Twitter and Facebook have lost their faddish appeal, people will still be trading knitting tips on Ravelry.

Then there’s the blogging connection. I’ve always been impressed by the way that the blogosphere can bring together like-minded people, and as a writing prompt site for bloggers, Read Write Poem has been helping to build such informal networks for a while now. I’ll be interested to see whether more people feel encouraged to start blogs as a result of membership in the new site. I saw one example of that yesterday, and another new member say that she had joined in part to try and work her way up to blogging. Since Read Write Poem retains a focus on weekly group writing exercises posted to members’ own blogs, there should be considerable peer pressure on non-blogging members to start blogs.

If so, it will be very positive outcome — and will further differentiate RWP from Facebook, where people are encouraged to upload photos and compose lengthy notes on-site. One result is that Facebook ends up with too much power over your content, and if your account gets suspended for some reason, you lose it. Dana and her co-conspirators have wisely decided not to try and turn Read Write Poem into a hosted blogging platform at this time, even though that is what WordPress-MU was designed for. It would mean a lot more time, money, hassle, and responsibility, and it’s not as if plenty of good blog hosting options don’t already exist. Still, it’s nice to have the freedom to spin off a few more blogs any time they feel the need without having to set up a new database with a fresh WordPress install, as would otherwise be the case. I gather they may do this down the road if the need arises for more narrowly targeted sub-sites.

So far BuddyPress has proved fairly intuitive to use — much more so than Facebook, for example. A few things still frustrate me, such as the lack of nesting throughout the network: whether in my personal news feed, a group “wire,” or a forum topic, I can’t reply to an earlier post in a thread and start a new branch, which seems to me a pretty basic need for a social network — even Identi.ca has that now (though Twitter and Facebook still don’t). I also don’t like the lack of RSS feeds or other opt-in subscription options for conversations. BuddyPress does offer group administrators the option to have members notified every time someone posts something, as happens on Facebook with every discussion in which one participates. But there’s no way for members to opt out, so none of the groups I’ve joined so far have enabled the feature. You can’t assume that everyone wants to get that much email.

Some people might be bothered by the lack of provision for private profiles, but for this kind of network I’m not sure there’d be any point in that. There are provisions for private, invitation-only groups, as well as for completely hidden groups, which should prove important for people who want to share poems and get critiques from just a few trusted friends.

Building a social network for poets is a risky business: we’re a notoriously fractious bunch. The managers have posted a code of conduct which contains a helpful list of “do’s,” such as:

  • Have fun (not “poke-the-skinny-kid-on-the-playground” fun, but “find-joy-in-expressing-yourself-and-reading-the-work-of-others” fun).
  • Make everyone feel safe and welcome.
  • Be generous with your enthusiasm and encouragement. And sincere. Always sincere.
  • Be respectful in comments sections on this site and on members’ sites. (In other words, our interactions are electronic dialogues; don’t spit on anyone or pull their hair.)

If most members follow these rules, and moderators and community managers are prompt in barring flagrant violators, it could turn into a really interesting place. In addition to Dana, Andre, and Deb, Nathan Moore and Dave Jarecki have also contributed considerable energy to building the site, and it appears to be a really active team overall. So far, the level of general excitement is high and discussions have taken off at many of the groups. The trouble is, I may have a hard time now going anywhere else! Though Dana & Co. may have thought they were creating a Facebook for poets, I fear that what they’ve actually created is flypaper for poets. You can hear the buzz from here.