Conversation: Poets in the Blogosphere

The HFR blog recently hosted a lively conversation between two poets on the purpose of blogging. We'd love to hear you weigh in!

“And what is the author’s autobiographical affect on today’s poetry readers? Isn’t it essential that the reader comes to the page without the metacontext of the poet’s life, so that the poem or sequence of poems can become a purely personal experience for the reader? When does “too much information” cloud our ability to feel a poem deeply at a personal level? Enter the poet-blogger. Without making any judgment here about intentions and motivations, I wonder how these super hip, insecure, admittedly fallible, often brilliant, and sometimes humble archangels of all things poetry can do what they do. Like it or not, the poet-blogging phenomenon is here to stay. But doesn’t it represent a bit of a shift, major or minor, of the poet’s personality infecting the way we ultimately read their poems?”
–Darren Morris

Click here for Darren's Contributor Spotlight on the HFR blog.

“Is recruiting readership a factor in why we engage the blogosphere? Sure. So is reviewing another poet’s book, or agreeing to be on an AWP panel, or hosting a series, or assembling an anthology. Is building an audience the main motivation for any of these acts? Not unless you’re a lover of maddening inefficiency. But building your artistic community builds your audience. It’s that simple, and I don’t apologize for it. I doubt Darren Morris truly begrudges our Wyoming snapshots, our nostalgic music picks, our blueberry compote recipes, or even our clumsy marketing attempts. I think he’s just worried that we’re disrupting a fragile balance in a zero-sum game. He calls reading a poem a meditative experience that “opens for us the doorway to a house of language where we can make ourselves at home.” In contrast, “blogs provide us a catalog of a single life begging us to agree.” A beautiful metaphor, but I’d have reversed it. The blog is the home: cluttered, chambered, dimly lit by the lady-leg lamp from A Christmas Story… It’s the poem that should be the argument: maybe not “begging us to agree,” no, but persuading the reader to shift his or her perception of the world in a focused way. Perhaps that’s the bias of the poet who is seeking myth and metaphor these days, pushing to write beyond the self.
–Sandra Beasley

Click here for Sandra's recent post on the HFR blog.