Today I got a report from another friend and fellow poet. If I understand her correctly it seems a few well established (entrenched?) poetry boards are also reconsidering certain, in my view draconian, management practices, looking for approaches between poets and readers and critics allowing for more latitude, certainly less institutionaled snarkiness. I say good on them too.

It all speaks to the, more or less, ongoing conversation here. And to something Clattery brought up over a year ago: the transactional analysis of how poets, readers, critics, and board and blog managers relate to each other. And I say good on Clattery also.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvayzIktTJ4

Thanks, old bean.

Tere

~ As the system stands I think it possible it is not just a failure, but a betrayal of the instinct for poetry. Back in 1991 Robert Bly put together a collection of essays on American poetry: “American Poetry: Wildness and Domesticity.” The collection includes an interview with Bly, conducted by Wayne Dodd. From the interview:

“Dodd: ‘It may also be that poets will be afraid to risk doing the really different thing, that might seem to be profoundly true to them nonetheless, for fear of being accused of peeing on the floor.’

Bly: ‘Oh, indeed! That’s right! I’m sure that the reviewers of Pound’s early work, which had a lot of freaky originality, accused him constantly of being poorly house-trained. What would originality look like today? . . . It’s possible that originality comes when the man or woman disobeys the collective. The cause of tameness is fear. The collective says: “If you do your training well and become a nice boy or girl we will love you.” We want that. So a terrible fear comes. It is a fear that we will lose the love of the collective. I have felt that intensely. What the collective offers is not even love, that is what is so horrible, but a kind of absence of loneliness. Its companionship is ambiguous, like mother love.’” ~

Yep. It isn’t only Poetry Foundation’s blog nurturing this sort of environment. Other blogs and boards too.

Terreson

Over the last ten years I’ve observed some pretty strange behavior on some few online poetry boards and poetry blogs. The Poetry Foundation’s management sanctioned shunning of posters by other posters on its blog is up there with the strangest of the strangest.

I’ve tried to live with the blog’s sanctioned and institutionalized practice of shunning, what has been in place for a good six months by now. I’ve done so because, from time to time, guest bloggers have interested me. I find I cannot. And it finally comes to me that any guest blogger is equally as responsible, by virtue of their (paid) involvement, as is management for the bad behavior. All of us wage earners have to dance with the devil, from time to time, simply in order to pay the bills. But not when it comes to poetry; at least not for me.

Tere

I was recently asked why one of my comments on Harriet went from plus ten to minus ten in a matter of minutes. Here is my reply:

“I believe there is someone on Harriet who has made it a crusade to collapse all of my comments. I suspect either XXXX or my old friend XXXX. I know this because I have been experimenting. If my comment is collapsed (minus seven votes = invisibility), I can vote it back into view. If I let it remain collapsed, nothing happens, even for days, but if I go in and vote it up, it goes back down within hours. No other posts are ever touched…just mine. This is true even on older posts. Old posts are closed for comments but you can still vote.

I have also learned that if I shut down and restart my computer I can then vote again. On several occasions I have has a ‘voting’ war with an unknown person. For every ‘like’ vote I clicked, a ‘dislike’ soon followed. This is how I know it is not just random voting but intentional. If it wasn’t personal, who else would be waiting to ambush a comment on a two-month old post? Pretty weird, eh?

It’s really kind of creepy to think that someone I don’t even know has such animosity towards me that they would expend this much time and effort just trying to hide my comments on Harriet. I thought about complaining to the administrators, but you know how much good that will do. I just try to avoid Harriet these days, which was obviously my antagonist’s intent.

As I explore more and more of the poetry blogosphere, I have noticed that the same old names come up. I believe that some of these individuals see the poetry blogs as their own personal space and resent any ‘newcomers’ who might actually disagree with or even criticize their view. A tragic thing, indeed. It seems that the last place one would expect to find such mean people is one where poets gather. I have learned from my internet experience, though, just how naïve this view is. Poets are, in fact, the nastiest people on Earth, at least the latest crop. There are so few opportunities for poets these days, and most of those simply trying to impress each other, that they are like a pack of hungry dogs with but a few small scraps between them.

Well, maybe things haven’t really changed so much. Here is an excerpt from a letter written to a newspaper in 1821 by a friend of John Keats:

“…It will be remembered that Keats received some rough and brutal usage from the Reviews about two years since; particularly from the Quarterly, and from a Northern one; which, in the opinion of every gentlemanly and feeling mind, has rendered itself infamous from its coarse pandarism to the depraved appetites of gossips and scandal-mongers. To what extent the treatment he received from those writers operated upon his mind I cannot say; for Keats had a noble – a proud – and an undaunted heart; but he was very young, only one and twenty. He had all the enthusiasm of the youthful poet burning in him – he thought to take the great world by the hand, and hold its attention while he unburthened the overflowings of an aspiring and ardent imagination; and his beautiful recasting of “The Pot of Basil” proves that he would have done so had he lived. But his ardour was met by the torpedo touch of one whose “Blood is very snow-broth;” and the exuberant fancies of a young and almost ungovernable fancy were dragged forward by another, and exhibited in gross and wanton caricature. It is truly painful to see the yearnings of an eager and trusting mind thus held up to the fiend-like laugh of a brutal mob, upon the pikes and bayonets of literary mercenaries.”

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2009/12/can-experimental-poetry-save-the-earth/#comment-26689

The blog has brought back to mind the Foundation’s practice of allowing people to anonymously vote for or against a post. So that there is a public record of my response I paste here just what I think of the practice. In my view it is a sham and it falsifies the exchange between poets:

~ Travis Nichols, if there was another avenue for bringing up an unpleasant, and compromising, topic I would take it. As best as I can figure no such avenue is to be found in the grid of Harriet’s streets. Ya’ll have made yourselves pretty much unreachable. Your blog on the poetry and positions of one John Kinsella employs a rather pointed, and in the case of the blog unfortunate, phrase: the personal in the political you say. I figure the personal political always starts at home. When it doesn’t there tends to crop up what Hegel called the world historical irony. By this he meant to bring attention to certain contradictions between the ideal and the historical record. Christianity has its contradictions between the morality of Jesus Christ and the historical workings of the Church. So does Democracy. So did Communism.

When I see a minus sign preceding my name I tend to get a negative view of myself. My inclination is to cancel out the vote with a plus vote of my own. It works as a neutralizing effect. Then sometimes to test the Harriet system, and after waiting some hours, I vote in the positive a second time. My immediately preceding post now has two “likes,” both of which are mine. To further test the system I gave the person, Rachel’s, post a “like” vote. Then a second. As of this writing two of the four positive votes are mine.

Do with the information what you will. And not just you, but all of the Harriet staff. I don’t much care. This voting system to which the blog seems to be inordinately attached is a sham. It is a lie. It can be manipulated, which means it means nothing. I’ll say it again. The personal political starts at home, starts in the home.

For Harriet’s to extoll the virtues of an environmentalist poet while, at the same time, setting up a system that falsifies the exchange between poets and poetry readers I call a contradiction between values and practice: a world historical irony on a small, immediate, scale.

Terreson

Posted By: Terreson on December 6, 2009 at 7:01 pm
Reply ~

This poetry board and poetry blog shit has got to stop. What tends to get generated by management.

Tere