poetry blogging

Love these photo/poem posts at p/p (via things)

and there's some wonderful words by Nick Piombino on blogging and poetry at fait accompli
Walter Benjamin's *Arcades Project* and Blogging:

Blogs also give the poet places to exhibit
themselves as demanded by Baudelaire and
Benjamin above. Again, the blogged "place"
happily offers the writer some truly deserved
and needed privacy. You are in the town
square but behind a curtain (a screen).
Unquestionably blogland is a marketplace
but a quaint one in which all the products
are free, and can be copied and exchanged
and interchanged at will

lots of Lorine Niedecker links at Wood s lot

(though still can't find an online: Will you write me a Christmas poem? which I read in a thick anthology a few years back. Can only find this line:
What a scandal Christmas What a scandle Christmas is, a red stick-up to a lily)

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Comments: poetry blogging

Quick remarks.
It is a marketpalce. Blogging is not free. Mine cost quite a lot to run in terms of domain name, hosting and metering traffic. Not to mention the tech support that needs to be bought in when you move beyond the basic blog.

Often they are more like stalls in the marketplace advertising their wares, than forums in the agora or private journals.

Thus the market bit.

But what is produced is not 'product' as Nick assumes. Blogs are also forums in the public domain. The forum bit comes from the conversation in the public domain, even if the conversation is a bit thin at times.

Blogs are oppositional to the market.That is their strength.

However, blogs are stalls/forums/journals that are located in cyper space. This space is disconnected from the places that we bodily inhabit. Not that many blogs explore place.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at December 17, 2003 05:51 PM

oh, I forgot to say.

those photos/poems are excellent.

What a find.

is not the weblog a truely wonderful medium?
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at December 17, 2003 05:59 PM

True - blogging is not free but:
a) blogspot is pretty close
b) most writers have already invested in the hardware and running costs of computers. Blogging is a bonus. (or...vast writerly debt trap ;) )
and
C) guess ecologically blogging and the blogosphere leaves its own footprint...

I think I may have grossly misrepresented Nick here by using only that quotation. In his post and particularly in this later one on Benjamin, he would seem to be in agreement with your `blogging as oppositional to the market'

http://nickpiombino.blogspot.com/2003_12_07_nickpiombino_archive.html#107121806017927525

(the archives seem slow at the moment, but if you scoll down from today you'll find it)

This is particulary so in the way that blogging decenters information and also priviliges the fleeting and ephemeral. eg

"the function of
commodity processes has
overwhelmed the perceptual
apparatus. Benjamin would
have loved the way a blogger
could move much so quickly
through informational time
and space as to outmaneuver
the one hypnotic materialistic
drone of information expressly
created for mass consumption..."

I think the use of marketplace here is to be read in the context of poetry. Blogging would seem to offer stall, exhibition space and cafe forum to a literary activity that has probably been sometimes fractured, sporadic and isolated?

And yes - the internet is indeed a good thing when it throws such links as p/p our way. Thanks be to the serious sifters and finders.
Posted by boynton at December 17, 2003 06:33 PM

"Thanks be to the serious sifters and finders."

Take a wee bow yerself Ms. B.
Posted by Sedgwick at December 17, 2003 07:46 PM

Thank ye - but when you see the Serious sifting, we be very wee comparitively.
Posted by boynton at December 18, 2003 02:02 PM