My favorite martian is Olena Kalytiak Davis. I’ve been reading poetry blogs trying to figure out what a blog is or could be, and hers over at the Poetry Foundation, all 10ish entries, okay yes. She makes something–not a poem–but those blogs are made things. (So at this point if you’re not my mother, you probably will and should just click here: OKD at TPF ) (bye!)
Also reading Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell and thinking (like everyone else) what if they’d been emailing?
In one of OKD’s posts for The Poetry Foundation, she writes a bit, then says, “now please go read something else. something good. as i was telling my girlfriend this weekend, the thing i love most about everyone and anyone i know is the hours they have spent alone reading. it’s usually the sexiest thing about them.” As the year 1948 begins, Elizabeth Bishop has just finished reading Trial of a Poet.
On the book’s back flap: “In their now celebrated correspondence, they performed best for one another“” Performing feels more blog-esque than letter-like.
Emails eat letters; blogs eat poems; emails eat notes/cards; blogs eat letters; emails eat letters with more intimacy, immediacy; texts eat phone calls; blogs eat diary entries with aspirations of Thoreau. Twittter eats haiku.
“We fill pre-existing forms and when we fill them we change them and are changed.” (Frank Bidart) I definitely mean we and not I.
“now please go read something else. something good“the thing i love most about everyone and anyone i know is the hours they have spent alone reading. it’s usually the sexiest thing about them.” Though reading blogs is about as sexy as sweatpants. (Hey, very sexy sweatpants.) On September 11, 1957, Robert Lowell is reading Keats’ letters.
Poetry blogs are …great for gossip (Lowell says in a letter I can’t find right now, “This one is full of gossip“) I know none; blogs are… prime for personal details (“I realize my Brazilian world really has come to an end and I must get out of it fast,” Bishop writes in May 1971.) I very Puritanically think letters are for lovers and blogs are for lovers, mothers, and potential employers.
I read for…information. Do opinion and half-baked insight count? I esteem…heightened language. What comes trippingly off the blog-time tongue?
John Taggart in an interview: “As a young writer you can’t imagine anything better than being around other people talking about poetry all the time. It seems like the most desirable state of affairs. And of course what you’re seeking, consciously or not, is validation that you in fact are a poet.”
So emails swallow standing at the cliff edge awaiting Echo; blogs consume cocktail parties, sharing study carrels with friends at the library.
“We fill pre-existing forms and when we fill them we change them and are changed.”
“now please go read something else. something good“the thing i love most about everyone and anyone i know is the hours they have spent alone reading. it’s usually the sexiest thing about them.” On December 14, 1957, Elizabeth Bishop is reading War and Peace in bed.
Time it takes to write a blog: Should be more than an email, but less than an essay, and MUCH less than a poem (who am I to say! This has taken me much longer than it has taken James Tate to write whatever poem he most recently wrote.)
Dear ______,
This morning I taught a child how to mail a letter. Better to have taught her cursive with a quill & feather? How to churn butter? In 1963, Bishop is scrambling to finish a letter to Lowell, unsure whether to send it to Maine, London, or Nice. A day after he receives it, on August 12th, Lowell writes, “Dearest Elizabeth: Your letter has been around the world.” While mine to you has been through so many pipes, wires, tubes.
-me
p.s. And what about Bartleby! What if his past included not a stint at the Dead Letter Office but a job as one of those spammers in an abandoned warehouse in southeast Asia? (I’ve no idea if spammers even have a locale. Vegas?)