By Lisa Russ Spaar
Like many who live in a university or college burg, I am keenly aware—despite lots of town-gown collaboration and mixing in restaurants, coffee houses, private homes, galleries, places of worship, music halls, bookstores, apple orchards, yoga studios, streets, food banks, and supermarkets—of the great divide. A weathered sign on the roof of a local pancake shop reads “Where University and Townspeople Meet.” One bar, now defunct, advertised its watering hole as a gathering place for “Mountain Men and Debutantes.” Though I’m not exactly sure how the distinctions play out in this last slogan, it would be naïve to think that some vestigial sense of “the university” in relation to the rest of the city does not endure and affect our identities and interactions.
The culture of poets in the academy can be afflicted by similar demarcations. Those “inside” tend to be acutely conscious of poets teaching at other institutions, many of whom were our former teachers, classmates, or students. We teach one another’s books, invite each other to give readings, await one another’s new publications with an interconnected anxiety and eagerness. Our professional publications and conferences feature, print, and advertise the work being published by university presses and by colleagues in the nation’s plethora of writing programs.
All the more reason to be grateful, then, for the protean community of writers both in and outside of the halls of higher education made manifest and widely available—and in a genuine way created—by the manifold, diverse Web sites, blogs, and other cyber-interactive spaces available to poets and readers of poetry. A Google search of “poetry Web sites” yields some 4,710,000 results. “Poetry blogs” turns up 7,950,000. Some of these links will, in turn, offer their assessment of the best (and worst) of these sites. Clearly, a boundary-obliterating, ever-evolving legion of readers and writers of poems burgeons.
The poet Ron Silliman, who maintains one of the most respected and longest running poetry-related sites in the blogosphere, comments that one consequence of there being “some 3,000 MFA’s per year and fewer than 70 jobs available … is that the academy is becoming a much smaller part of the picture than it ever was before. I still think that the big story about writing in my lifetime lies in the demographics, from a few hundred poets to tens of thousands. The meaning of poetry in the aggregate is changing, and I don’t think any of us has a very good handle as yet about what that really means.”
A colleague of mine recently commented that he’d know it was time to retire when he grew weary of keeping up with the technologies involved. My friend was speaking in frustrated response, I think, to our university’s implementation of a new Sisyphean student-information system, but he has a point. Though there are many within the halls of higher education, even in creative writing, who are on the cutting edge of the most current technologies, there are others, like myself, who hold steadfastly to e-mail, and who do not Facebook or tweet—and not out of any Luddite bully pride but because, in my case at least, I feel lucky to get my hair washed each busy week, let alone keep up with all those friends and tweets. Still, I want to stay connected, especially with new and intrepid work being done by people I do not know or of whom I’ve not yet heard, which makes me all the more appreciative of those sites that reach out in various ways to people not inclined to spend a lot of time online.
Of these, I’d like to mention two in particular, though there are many.
Poetry Daily was founded in the mid-1990s by Diane Boller, Don Selby, and Rob Anderson. At the time, all three were working at a law publishing company, exploring how the Internet could be used to sell law books. Boller and Selby continue to maintain this popular poetry site (depending upon the time of year, PD gets slightly over 10,000 unique visitors on popular days, and well over 12,000 e-mail addresses are listed as subscribers to its weekly newsletter). It offers, in a kind of clearinghouse, a new poem a day, accompanied by a featured book, press, or journal, along with a list of recently received books, a weekly updated news page of current reviews, essays, and awards, a list of contests, and a splendid archive of poems.
Boller writes that when she and her colleagues started the site, “the Internet was brand new … and seemed an exciting way for niche print publishers to make their work more widely known. We’re poetry readers, not poets, and did not have an academic institution as an anchor, so it was difficult for us to find out what poets were publishing where (in which journals), or even sometimes to find books by poets whose work we had already discovered and admired. We started Poetry Daily, inviting publishers to send us their publications, so that we could introduce representative poems to our readers, one a day. We were surprised and pleased to discover that there was a large audience of poetry readers who were, like us, trying to figure out which poets they enjoyed reading, and where to find their poetry.”
On a Tuesday evening in November 2010, for example, a reader can find at PD four new poems by the London freelance journalist and critic Alan Brownjohn, a note about his new book, a smart essay by Carol Moldaw about whether writing poetry is a “luxury or necessity,” reprinted from AGNI, and a host of recently arrived titles and poetry news-related pieces. For those potential readers not inclined to browse the Internet on their own, Boller and Selby send out a weekly e-mail newsletter alerting readers to features in the week ahead.
I have never met the poet and critic Ron Slate, but I know something of the quality of his mind thanks to the periodic e-mails he sends out, alerting readers not regularly trawling the Internet to his Web site, On the Seawall. It serves as a homepage for Slate, but is devoted primarily to his discerning, elegant, forthright reviews of new work by others. His far-reaching and aesthetically diverse tastes have acquainted me with many poets, fiction writers, artists, and critics I would not have otherwise encountered (for instance, Joanna Klink, who wrote this week’s Arts & Academe Monday’s Poem, is someone I first read about and have grown to admire tremendously as the result of Slate’s review of her second book). Slate periodically invites other writers to recommend new books in a kind of round-up, and in this way creates a space that feels generative and full of dialogue.
Slate earned his master’s degree in creative writing from Stanford University in 1973 and did his doctoral work in American literature at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, but left academe in 1978 and did not receive a degree. He started a poetry magazine, The Chowder Review, in 1973 and it was published through 1988. After leaving academe, he was hired as a corporate speechwriter, beginning his business career in communications and marketing. From 1994-2001 he was vice president of global communications for EMC Corporation. More recently he was chief operating officer of a biotech/life sciences start-up and co-founded a social network for family caregivers. His business career is now over. Although he published poetry in the 1970s and early 80s, he stopped writing for nearly 20 years. Then in 2001, he began writing once again. His first book, The Incentive of the Maggot, was published by Houghton Mifflin in 2005 and was nominated for both the National Book Critics Circle Prize and the Lenore Marshall Prize. This was followed by The Great Wave (2009), also from Houghton.
On the Seawall was launched in August 2007, on Slate’s 57th birthday. He tells me that he intended at first “to blog in the stricter sense—that is, to post comments regularly and generate conversation.”
“But I discovered,” he said, “that I had little to say and no desire to obligate myself to say it every day. Writing about books, however, gives me enough space and time to understand the shape of my response. A book of poems (or any artwork) tries to create a place for experience. My job is to discover the place and describe the source of my pleasure as specifically as I can. William Meredith said, ‘One cannot review a bad book without showing off.’ A writer should be wary of conforming to his own tastes, so I cover a range of poetry (and other genres). I’m not interested in devoting energy to work that fails to stimulate or provoke me just to tweak someone’s nose. The Seawall is an American poets’ site—but its impulse is cross-genre and global. To admire is tantamount to being influenced—and since I take much out of my fiction and nonfiction reading, I assume other poets do, too. In sum: I maintain The Seawall to keep in touch with people, to enjoy our communal literary life, to bring accomplished writing to the attention of my following, and to elevate my pulse.”
According to Google statistics, more than 415,000 visits have been made to On the Seawall since August 2007, with some 200,000 visits in the past year alone. About 15 percent of this traffic is international. Slate points out that blogging has changed over the past 18 months or so. “Many formerly all-poetry bloggers,” he says, “are going cross-genre. Twitter has changed where the audience is headed. Blogging regularly takes a lot of energy and commitment, and many of the original poetry bloggers have run out of steam. My activity on the Internet is guided more often now by Twitter. Twitter has expanded my site’s audience and so has Facebook.”
It’s not surprising that many of these poetry-related sites are maintained by poets: Ron Silliman, Jerome Rothenberg, Don Share, Laura Sillerman, Slate himself, and countless others. Since so many of these steadfast, stalwart stewards of the poetry of others rarely tout their own work at their own sites, I offer below a new, unpublished poem by Ron Slate, which offers a richly restrained account of the death of Erik Satie, the experimental, minimalist composer and avant-garde writer. Slate’s poem considers Satie’s literal demise, of course, but also explores his death in terms of the parallel decay of certain sensibilities, or the perception of them, in one’s milieu. Following the poem is a short list of some of the sites Slate is currently visiting, a catalog that includes Silliman’s blog and Poetry Daily.
Perhaps what’s most exciting about these sites that blur distinctions between writers in and outside of academic settings is the way they encourage us to read. Long ago, when I graduated from college, I thought, “at last I can read, really read, the way I want to read: not just what’s assigned to me, but in a way that allows the authors I encounter to lead me to new texts. If Ai read Plath, I would read Plath. Plath read Dickinson: I would read her; Dickinson read Emily Brontë, and so I’d read her next. And this might bring me round to Agha Shahid Ali, Claudia Rankine, Anne Carson, Susan Howe, Rae Armantrout, and so forth, backward and forward in time, across sensibilities and cultures. I am grateful for the ways these virtual sites invite this kind of exchange by providing a wider, more various, vital, world- and mind-opening lens into poetry and poetics than I might be able to find on my own.
Here is Ron Slate’s poem:
The Death of Erik Satie
The arches aspire to a point
in the church of childhood,
a single note here and here and here.
Drafty gothic undertones, the grandiose
obscurity of the modern mind.
Cirrhosis, then pleurisy.
Hours waiting in stillness,
as in an empty cabaret.
A bell tinkles in the corridor, the viaticum
drifts toward the dying man next door.
Something long ago made the world
hostile. So of course one mocks
a style no longer exploitable.
Conversation with the nuns —
You understand, the Creator
commits technical errors, he keeps us
at arm’s length, his soiled cuff
fills us with medieval joy.
The patient rebuffs Poulenc and Ravel —
but admits Braque, Brancusi, Stravinsky,
stand there and there and there.
There is nothing left to renounce.
Choirs, music hall songs, then through the war
anyone could witness the decline.
Curses for the idiots — Mon Cher Directeur,
you are brutal, inhospitable, you are under arrest.
The Pope is excommunicated! Monsieur et cher ami,
vous n’êtes qu’un cul, mais un cul
sans musique. One must reject the obvious.
Final years, cognac and beer,
then home to a dusty room with a depleted piano,
desolate possessions, scores inscribed
affectionately by Debussy, before the feud.
Franc notes poke from the pages
of books, advance payment for final music.
The rolled umbrella clutched more tightly.
A filament of notes,
each one intended. Something long ago
created this secret sorrow. Erik Satie dies
at the Hôpital Saint-Joseph.
© by Ron Slate. Printed by permission of the author.
And here are Ron Slate’s recommended sites:
Poetry Daily http://poems.com/
Silliman’s Blog http://www.ronsilliman.blogspot.com/
How a Poem Happens http://www.howapoemhappens.blogspot.com/
Poems and Poetics http://www.poemsandpoetics.blogspot.com/
Squandermania http://donshare.blogspot.com/
Poets at Work http://poetsatwork.tripod.com/
Lisa Russ Spaar, poetry editor for Arts & Academe, is a professor of English at the University of Virginia.
(A&A illustration incorporating an image by Flickr user kodomut)
Sisyphusian