Alan Kellogg wrote interesting comments (here and here) on my last two posts, pointing the way for me to attempt to clarify what I'd tried to say.
I've got a long list of poet's blogs over on the left. I'm not going to pretend I look at each of them every day, or even every week or month. Quite a few I visit only when I'm revising the list (later tonight if the stars are auspicious) to see if they've gone dark, making room for new items. My referrer logs tell me I'm not unusual in that respect. The poetry blogosphere is not like one of Ron Silliman's scenes, where certain people make themselves so indispensable, so shape the discourse, that everyone near has to pay attention. I no longer read Silliman, despite his 2 billionth visitor*. When I or anyone else posts a poem, for the most part only those people who already want to see what I'm doing will actually see it — only people already in the conversation. Even on the rare occasions when someone like Kasey Mohammad mentions something here, the spike in traffic brings very few new readers and virtually no new regular readers, and I doubt that that mention will bring new readers to Kasey.
Unless those readers were first brought here from 2Blowhards, or Pharyngula, or ErosBlog, or some other site which doesn't ordinarily deal with poetry at all.
Inside the poetry world there are no costs, no risks (except being ignored), and therefore almost no chance of making any difference. Online that's even more true, since neither I nor any other blogger has to persuade anyone else to put resources at our disposal. Being middle class, we've all got computers and a net connection and we can pretend we're publishing. We can even pretend we're doing something new, making progress.
Horseshit.
There is no significant market for poetry, and that means that poets can't tell whether what they're doing is any good. The amazing costless connectivity of the net means it's too easy to hook up with people just like you. If you're one in a million, there are eight of you in New York City, but they're still hard to find. Google means you can easily find the 300 like you in the US, and that makes for a damned good daily hit count for a poetry site.
It's a cliché that poets aren't recognized till after their deaths, but that doesn't make it true. Name one. Even Blake had patrons. The fact is that none of our great poets were ignored in their lifetimes. Many, maybe most, either had private means or made their livings doing something besides poetry, but their poetry was talked about and patrons, magazines, and book publishers put real money on the line. Maybe the fact that they did make their livings doing something else made their poetry interesting enough for people to put money on the line.
I've said that I don't believe in progress in the arts, but that's perhaps misleading — I don't believe, for instance, that the Impressionists as a group were an improvement over predecessors, or that accentual-syllabic verse is an improvement over Anglo-Saxon prosody. But changes in the arts do reflect and take advantage of changed technical and economic opportunities, which may or may not be the result of real progress. I haven't read Tyler Cowen's In Praise of Commercial Culture, but the reviews linked here suggest some of what I mean: Ray Sawhill's piece notes that the invention of metal tubes for paint (progress) made Impressionism possible. I was depressed when I wrote about failing to make Anglo-Saxon verse, but the the shift from an inflected to a syntactic structure (mere change) made strong-stress alliterative verse in English very difficult — even the king of the cats, Richard Wilbur, struggles in "Lilacs" and "Junk."
Perhaps more important than changes in technical opportunity is the role of the artist as entrepreneur suggested in the reviews. As both of the linked articles note, that idea is anathema to both the left and the right, but really, in the absence of a market, in which people prove by their willingness to exchange something of value that particular poems are indeed valuable to them, how can any poet, any of us, be sure we're reaching anyone but freaks like us?
* Clearly Silliman's doing something better than the rest of us, but consider that the audience for a failing TV show on the Fox network is bigger on any given night than the total number of visitors to Silliman's blog in 3 years. Poetry is truly small beer.
6:57:12 PM 
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