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Read my book, TEACHING BEAUTY IN DeLILLO, WOOLF, AND MERRILL (Palgrave Macmillan; forthcoming), co-authored with Jennifer Green-Lewis. VISIT MY BRANCH CAMPUS AT INSIDE HIGHER ED





UD is...
"Salty." (Scott McLemee)
"Unvarnished." (Phi Beta Cons)
"Splendidly splenetic." (Culture Industry)
"Except for University Diaries, most academic blogs are tedious."
(Rate Your Students)
"I think of Soltan as the Maureen Dowd of the blogosphere,
except that Maureen Dowd is kind of a wrecking ball of a writer,
and Soltan isn't. For the life of me, I can't figure out her
politics, but she's pretty fabulous, so who gives a damn?"
(Tenured Radical)

Tuesday, March 15, 2005

THE BLOGOSPHERE AND
THE POETRYSPHERE



One thing UD likes a lot about the blogosphere is that you’re judged and read -- or not read -- almost solely on the quality of your writing and ideas. I’ve never met or had anything to do with the fifty or so bloggers who link to me. I know a handful of the six hundred people (that's according to Webalizer - Sitemeter, which I've just strapped on, has me at less than that) who read me every day. The rest are anonymous, and a good many of them are far away: in Malaysia, France, Germany, Denmark, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Africa, Iceland, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Poland, Italy, Greece, Malta, and (most intriguingly) Vatican City.

I don’t know anyone at the website Inside Higher Ed - they’ve linked to two pieces of mine because they read them on a screen and thought they were interesting. The web, although subject like anything else to cronyism, is, UD thinks, among the least corrupt venues for one’s work, simply because the human being who produces the work is in important respects independent and invisible - without institutional affiliation, without a face.

UD quoted Andrew Sullivan on the blogosphere in an earlier post [UD, 12/19/04]. Here's the quotation again:

"The bloggers are conduits, forums, niches, designed to unleash the broader wisdom of the online crowds. That's one reason a Hayek-Oakeshott Tory like me loves the blogosphere so much. Not so much spontaneous order as the endless pursuit of a million intimations - a constant conversation, with peaks and lulls, discourtesies and jokes, outbursts and rants, meditations and quips, and all going nowhere in particular. And in the end, some truths do emerge, if you have the balls to acknowledge them. It's the purest form of democratic discussion yet devised. It's a big fucking deal. But if you're reading this, you probably know that."







All the way on the other side of this question of corruption is the poetrysphere. Here cronyism is so rampant that a number of websites - Foetry prominent among them - are devoted to chronicling the shamelessness of fixed poetry contests which dupes pay a fee to enter -- contests whose winners are remarkably often friends, students, family members of the judges, or graduates of the schools that sponsor the contests. “Although the site's blustery tone can be off-putting,” writes the New York Times, “Foetry has helped focus attention on a serious issue confronting the poetry world -- as the number of poets has increased, and with many of those writers spending upward of $25,000 to acquire an M.F.A., the institutions intended to help preserve and develop American poetry sometimes operate as if the art were an 18th-century guild, complete with secret handshakes. Can the poetry world become more transparent? If so, would it make contemporary writing more interesting?”

The most notorious recent poetry contest case - one that UD even now has trouble believing - is that of Jorie Graham, who bestowed a prize on her own husband [“University of Georgia Press has been running their poetry contest for twenty years and when asked refused to name the judges of their Poetry Series Competition,” a letter writer to the website Mobylives comments. “An Open Records Act request to the state of Georgia Attorney General's office forced the Press to release the records which revealed a remarkable number of conflict of interest choices in the winners of the Poetry Series, including Jorie Graham's selection of her husband (and Harvard English Department colleague) Peter Sacks as a winner in the series.”]

Institutional cronyism, as Inside Higher Ed points out, is a less dramatic but more systemic problem: “The 2004 winners of Iowa's poetry contest were Megan Johnson, who has an MFA from the Writers' Workshop, and Susan Wheeler, who has taught at Iowa. The Foetry Web site also lists many past winners with Iowa connections, and it didn't help matters much when the Iowa Press recently announced the winners of its annual short fiction contest, who also had Iowa ties.”

Crooked contests are part of the larger picture of poetry writing in the American university (most of the contests are university-sponsored), in which most of the classroom grades are As; and they are part of the larger picture of poetry writing in the publishing world, in which most of the reviews are positive. (UD’s written about some of this before, in a post dated 12/30/03). The situation has gotten so bad that some authors of books about poetry open with a version of the disclaimer Camille Paglia begins with in her forthcoming book, Break, Blow, Burn: “Poetry's declining status has made its embattled practitioners insular and self-protective: personal friendships have spawned cliques and coteries in book and magazine publishing, prize committees and grants organisations. I have no such friendships and am a propagandist for no poet or group of poets.”

Poetry has declined, Paglia suggests, because poets “have lost ambition and no longer believe they can or should speak for their era. Elevating process over form, they treat their poems like meandering diary entries and craft them for effect in live readings rather than on the page. Arresting themes or images are proposed, then dropped or left to dribble away. Or, in a sign of lack of confidence in the reader or material, suggestive points are prosaically rephrased and hammered into obviousness. Rote formulas are rampant - a lugubrious victimology of accident, disease, and depression or a simplistic, ranting politics…” A writer for the New Criterion’s website describes sites like Foetry as part of a “rising backlash against the hypersensitive Kindergarten of American poetry today.”

At a time when poems have become boringly personalized, it should not be surprising that the act of judging them is often purely personal as well. The aesthetic quality of language and the subtlety of thought in a poem have gradually become less important than the self-presentation of the person writing the poem. When relatively objective criteria of value fall away, what’s left is who you like, who you know, who you pity, and who you love.

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Update: On the vexed business of determining how much traffic this or any other blog gets, see this post and the ensuing exchange.