My last two posts have been seen by some as attacks on poetry weblogs, or on poetry written primarily for personal satisfaction, or on both. They certainly were not meant to be.
I've been blogging for more than three years, and it has proved immensely valuable to me as a poet for several reasons:
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I've written a good deal more poetry than my history suggests I would otherwise have done.
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I've had to think harder and write more clearly about metrical matters than I had before.
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It has forced me to be more articulate about why I like the poetry I like, whether metrical or not.
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In some cases it has helped me discover whether or not I do in fact like certain poems and kinds of poetry — it's really hard to spend time writing about things I don't much like.
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Through comments and referrals, it has introduced me to interesting thinkers and poets and a few new friends.
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Because I'm a non-academic who lives hours from any urban center, I don't have any practical alternatives beyond blogging, listservs, and discussion boards if I want to participate in a serious conversation about poetry.
As for the second possible target, the value of "personal" poetry, I can answer that I've had so little in the way of public recognition over the last 35 years that only personal satisfaction could possibly have kept me going.
But I started making poems, at least after I got past the advantages of being a sensitive guy, in order to participate in a very grand conversation which includes the verses of Homer, Sappho, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Whitman, Eliot, and Frost — and the Earl of Wilmot, George Crabbe, Leigh Hunt, Gertrude Stein, Theodore Roethke, Billie Collins, and Jorie Graham. My point in the last couple of posts is to wonder if that's any longer possible, regardless of what talent I may or may not have. Who reads Fence with approval and also looks forward to The Hudson Review, or vice versa? What does it mean that the monstrously large Poems for the Millennium doesn't contain a single poem by Robert Frost, W. H. Auden, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Elizabeth Bishop, Anthony Hecht, Sylvia Plath, or Richard Wilbur? Is anyone surprised that I think it's not only monstrously large, but monstrous? Should I be happy that there's a new journal devoted to metrical poetry, where the work of some of my favorite poets will not be welcome but where I may have a better than average chance of acceptance?
I thought — and I guess I still think — that blogs, and the web in general, have the potential to re-open the lines of communication between the isolated poetry worlds that have grown since the Second World War (members of avant gardes once thought they were opening new territory for the rest of us, but now they try to maintain their separateness for its own sake), but what I've seen so far is also an ability to find enough people who think just like me to create the illusion of a grand conversation.
12:28:20 PM 
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