Thoughts on The New Blog
Posted on December 19, 2006
Filed Under Blogging, Writing |
I’ve got the new weblog set up with the help of my online friend Andru Matthews, though I haven’t had a chance to begin taking advantage of my new digs yet. Once the last details of my semester (read: grading) are over, I hope to have a more leisurely look around my own site & begin to think about what else I might do here. Other than keep an intellectual & poetic journal. Which will be the main focus of this space. (Is it actually a space? The metaphor is ubiquitous. I remember AKMA talking about this years ago.) So far, I like WordPress — it lets me do more things more easily than Textpattern despite being somewhat less elegant. I also like having a hosting company (BlueHost) that doesn’t have the structure of a fan club (TextDrive). Hint: If you are personally offended when customers raise problems about service, you are a club, not a business, no matter how big your data center, or how hip your technology.
Well then, I’m sitting out here at the very tip of the long tail, wondering exactly what it is I’m doing & I’ve decided that, basically, I’m making a record, keeping track of at least one aspect of my life. But, doing that, I have to assume that a few readers will want to look over my shoulder. Otherwise, no point. So it’s a record, but not a private record & that implies at least a modest responsibility to a potential reader. But which “aspects” of my life? For the most part, the public aspects — what I would say or publish in any case, online or off. (I’ve never been a particularly confessional blogger & I’m not about to begin now.) That leaves as subjects: writing poetry, reading poetry & other things, listening to popular music(s), teaching, cooking, dogs, politics, & what I have called “river notes,” little observations on the rocks & trees & creatures who live around me on the bank of the Raquette River in northern New York. Those are my enthusiasms & avocations. Of these subjects, the only ones I can claim real expertise in are reading & writing poetry. And living by the river, I guess.
In addition to ease-of-use, the other reason I made a change of blogging software, server & over-all look & feel is that a certain kind of political anger had infected the old blog. Politics — the American slide toward fascism — remains of paramount concern to me. But when writing about current American politics, I find that my anger & disappointment overwhelm me. Now, I believe in anger. If you read the poems in the last part of my book Magical Thinking, you will sense — I hope — an incandescent anger. But those poems were written slowly, each one over the course of months & in some cases years; a blog post doesn’t lend itself to that sort of development. Nor should it. The virtue of the weblog is the ability to sketch ideas quickly. Beyond matters of genre, anger is best grounded in love. I find I can ground my anger in love — sometimes — when writing poetry, but not in the immediate flow of a blog post. Not usually, anyway. I’ll be limiting casual political posts here, for my own good — they leave me feeling sick — & because such posts don’t add anything to the discourse. Occasionally, if I think I have an interesting angle of sight on political topics, I’ll write something. Usually, that will mean finding a political perspective that comes through my work as a poet or teacher.
I’m sure that is all very edifying & I write it all out in such detail more as a reminder to myself than as an advertisement. There is a potentially interesting discussion of genre & subject matter that emerges from these considerations, but I’ll leave that to another meta-entry. My instinct about this is that the big blogs up near the rat’s butt have absolutely defined genre boundaries, whereas those of us out at the little pink tip of the tail are all over the place in both subject matter & genre.
Comments
2 Responses to “Thoughts on The New Blog”
Stumble it!
Sounds fabulous, I’m along for the ride!
So am I. Making the distinction between a private and public journal is difficult. It has to be private enough for the reader to be engaged in a dialogue with a real person (not as in an essay where the ideas are the be all and the end all) yet public enough so you yourself feel a sense of freedom. Are readers more interested in the personal details of our lives or in our ideas? I’m not sure.