“His letters are not simply a wonderful adjunct to his poems, but a vital and valuable part of them: they often serve as testing grounds for his theories and ideas, and always blend spontaneity and calculation in a way which allows us to see him in the round.”

There are many reasons why poets take up other forms of writing. Not the least is a practical aspect. John Ashbery once pointed out that he, like most poets, can only write poetry for an hour or so per day–and so what to do with the rest of the hours in a day? Poets often write prose simply for the love of writing.

Baudelaire instructs us to “Always be a poet, even in prose.” Writing prose can be for some poets what it is for a specialized athlete to visit the gym–a way to stay limber and fit. But there are other, deeper needs fulfilled by supplementing poetry with prose. Keats’s letter writing is analogous to the modern phenomenon of poet-bloggers. And clearly, there are some timeless impulses held in common between the two.

One is the need for directness. Andrew Motion points out that “in his poems Keats cultivates a language which is carefully distanced from normal discourse. In his letters he writes with brilliant directness.” The gap has closed in most modern poetry between the diction of poetry and the diction of direct address (and now some poets even experiment with Tweets or, like Paul Muldoon, craft poems in the form of text messages). Yet despite the plainspoken nature of contemporary poetry, the art of poem craft differs considerably from impromptu direct address. Poetry is inherently self-conscious in that it is word-conscious and form-conscious–even in free verse.

By contrast, a letter from John Keats would contain, according to Motion, “freely associating inquiry and incomparable verve and dash–a headlong charge in which jokes, anecdotes, ‘little bits of news’, snatches of bawdy, imitations of comic Shakespearian garrulity, mockery and gossip are swirled together with poetic ‘axioms’ and subtle deliberations.” This sounds a lot like blogging to me.

Another need the epistle (be it letter or blog) fulfills is the motivation of audience. Poetry can be a lonely art. Modern audiences represent a fraction of the general populace, and even communities of fellow poets have divided into thin aesthetic slivers within this already small pie. Don Marquis is credited with saying that “publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose-petal down the Grand Canyon, and waiting for the echo.” Writing a letter, or publishing a blog, is far more certain to draw an audible response.

And so, many poets fulfill their deeper needs for directness, engagement, and a sense of audience through epistolary communication–be it sealed in an envelope, rolled in a bottle, tied to a pigeon toe, or uploaded–like this!–to a blog.

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John Keats, Book Vandal

Visual Cortex diagram courtesy Wikipedia

I have been questioning my preference for reading poetry on paper versus digital text for some time now, wondering what might underpin these instincts. It recently occurred to me that the difference in mental state I experience when reading a book versus surfing the web may actually have a basis in science. The advent of digital text has made a staggering amount of information available to us, and thereby altered forever how we learn. The further proliferation of digital text through the internet, and especially now with blogging and social networking, has made our ability to filter through words a survival skill. We must read faster than ever in the information age, skimming for nuggets of meaning or amusement.

Just how have we learned to read faster in the information age? Short of a research grant, an EEG machine, and plenty of literate volunteers, I have only a sample size of one, and my subjective methods of self-observation to guide me. But my theory is that we bias the visual processing centers of our brain, instead of the auditory centers, when surfing the web. This theory is supported by speed-reading courses that attempt to eliminate sub-vocalization and auditory processing to teach people to read faster. And yet, poetry has been an aural medium for centuries.

What are the implications for our poetics when readers stop listening to poetry in their head? Could this have a relationship to the advent of visual poetry, and language poetry, and to the false-starts of neo-formalism? Might the rise of free verse even go hand-in-hand with this explosion of the accessibility of written material? Surely, other factors, like the effects of the Second World War on postmodernism, play greatly into contemporary poetics. Yet this simple theory, with its potentially biological basis–that in an age glutted with words, we have stopped listening to their music–may have as much to say about contemporary poetry, and its decline from popular favor, as rock-n-roll has to say about the decline of classical music.

Furthermore, the volume of writing shows no signs of letting up. As Thomas Swick puts it in his essay, “Have Book, Will Travel”:

Tell a writer you write and depression sets in; tell a writer you read and gratitude blooms. Especially now, in the Blog Age, when it seems that more people want to write than to read (not realizing that you need to read in order to write anything that is worth reading, or that hasn’t already been written). But this is the inevitable result when a culture prizes self-expression over learning. It is the written equivalent of a room in which everyone is talking and nobody is listening, particularly to the dead.

Indeed, it seems to be an art that is increasingly fading in our cultural memory–the art of listening–to ourselves, each other, the music of our language, and the wisdom of the dead. Perhaps my relationship to books is not anachronistic, or fetishistic; perhaps it is not the smell of the binder’s glue, the feel of the page, the pleasures of a good font in dark ink, or anything else about the book itself that I love so much as that poems served up in this format literally change my head space, making me quiet, attentive, and able to hear–really hear–what the poem is saying to me.

And then just tonight, over spiced cider, someone revealed to me they had spent hours on this site, reading past entries. It opened up a whole new dimension to our conversation, and in fact may have even made such a conversation possible–since I can naturally be quite taciturn in real life. And so, despite the waning glamour of blogging in general, and a dip in traffic on this site specifically, I find myself thankful for the incredible access to interesting people, and ensuing sense of community, that this little website has given me.

And thank you, dear reader, for being a part of that.

“I rhyme / To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.”

Wired Magazine‘s Paul Boutin recently declared personal blogging dead. Soon after, The Atlantic‘s Andrew Sullivan Seamus Heaney rhapsodizes on his boyhood love of wells, then concludes that writing poetry has become a sublimation of this love of the messy, muddy darkness no longer accepted in adulthood. I, too, write–both poems and blog posts–to create reflection in the dark, and to delight in the mess.

I did not start as a poetry blogger, but rather converted my existing site from a static collection of all-about-me pages into the chronological format of a blog. I did so around the time I became a freelance technology writer and consultant. It became a great outlet for me to float my nascent technical ideas before a global audience, and I soon found my blog posts widely re-syndicated.

This was during the heyday of personal blogging. Boutin now sees this golden age as having been pulled apart by two forces: the major news sources catching on, and dominating the market, and social networking sites like Facebook providing an alternative outlet for those seeking self-expression and a social community of peers online.

But my blog isn’t about monetizing my writing. Otherwise, I would still be mostly writing about technology. And, although I joined Facebook some time ago, social networking messages and status updates have by no means supplanted my writing here.

I never set out to write about poetry, or about grief for that matter. But by following the thread of my thoughts through the thread of my life, I seem to have touched upon a wide range of subjects, and to have built new thoughts upon past ruminations. In doing so, I feel I have also actually begun to build up a greater understanding of my self, and of how best to share that self with others. Far beyond “self-expression,” blogging for me represents a means to see myself in Heaney’s well, to gaze down through layers of history, into the dark.

For those who are afraid of the dark, perhaps it is true that many of the rewards of blogging’s prime have withered, and with it a certain breed of personal blogging has died. For the rest of us, I say: personal blogging is dead; long live personal blogging!

I was saddened to read that technology journalist Marc Orchant passed away this afternoon, having been unconscious for several days following a major heart attack. I only met Marc once in person, but he struck me as vibrant, fit, and extremely likable. He is survived by his wife and two children. If you feel moved to help support them through what must be an incredibly challenging holiday time, details on making a donation are available here.

Marc’s was a lightning-quick creative intelligence and, coupled with his love of technology, made for stimulating conversation and insightful reading on ZDNet and, later, blognation. The blogosphere is abuzz with tributes to his memory. For my part, I would like to extend my heartfelt condolences to his family, and hope that they are buoyed up by the support of friends and family during this time.

Funnily enough, although we only live a few pretty blocks apart in the sleepy idyll that is Ojai, she found out about my rekindled interest in Heaney from this website. Who says blogging doesn’t have its rewards? In the end I have only to say: thank you, Kelly. I will use it well.

Contrast these ironic editor’s notes with Ploughshares, which runs a blog to engage with topics in contemporary letters as they happen, or Zyzzyva, which also runs a blog to give a peek inside the independent periodical’s “struggle day by day.” I hesitate to characterize this as simply an old-media-versus-new-media divide. But actively engaging in dialog with the literary community through blog entries and comments puts a voice (or voices) to the publication that makes me feel more loyal, and somehow connected, to their project. I am not suggesting that the North American Review start a blog. The magazine was, in fact, worth the wait. And as I said in my note to the magazine staff, I wish them all the best in their efforts to catch up. But the literary conversation seems to be happening at a faster pace nowadays, and periodicals are being published for more than just libraries. I wonder if even reputable magazines can long afford to keep their workings largely offline and opaque.