This is my 840th post at Eyewear (give or take, some have gone by the wayside). I confess to being agnostic about blogs - the fact I have one should not be considered a ringing endorsement. I blog, therefore I am in the blogosphere, but where that gets me, or you, or anyone, is another matter. I think that this uncertain (or to be more stylish - say problematic) genre which is a blog leads to errors in reader response - though, how can any reader ever be really wrong about their own reaction? It is my experience that the Internet is not a cool medium. Or do I have that inverted? What I mean is, it evokes strong, near-instant responses. Blogs are emotive. They employ and discharge feeling - in that sense, they are like elements within poetry. But blogs also use (usually) prose, and are informative, and discursive - hence, the rational patina of much blog writing.Still, the writing may appear calm and cool and collected, but the impression, of a reader, upon finding their name, or book, or other cultural object, mentioned or reviewed, on a blog, is often visceral. One of the problems with a new medium is that no one knows what it is yet. They used to use phones, in Budapest, to deliver the morning news, like radio - every house would be called simultaneously, and someone would read the listeners the news. Blogs are a bit like that too - the messenger and message are still confused.
In other words: the urgent immediacy and in-yer-faceness of the blog format is actually the medium's fault, not the individual blogger's style - yet too often, readers fume and chafe, not against the medium, but the messenger. So it is that, every week, or so, some well-known literary figure, critic, or other "name" appears, to carp about something I have written.
It strikes me as curious, that, in this busy, aggressive British media world, poets and other writers think they have the right to bully bloggers for expressing their own opinion (David Wheatley has been known to blog about my blog, accusing me of whingeing, for instance). If I've put a foot wrong, and said something personally hurtful, I will remove it at once, of course - that's my policy. Unlike critics such as Logan, say, in the States, I never seek to mock or belittle. Gently chide, perhaps, but never mock. I use a blog because, unpublished in the UK in book form, and without a big publishing marketing machine, a fancy education or trumped up prizes to back me up, I have only my own wit and writing to get by on. But, as I have found in these least literary of literary worlds, polite dissent is not brooked in this poetry turf war.
Without Official Puffery there is only panache. But, is that reason enough to waste time, yours and mine, on this hybrid form (confessional, diary, ledger, day-book, review, essay collection, memoirs, etc)? Likely not, but I shall continue to assay it, as best I can.
Comments
I don't like to see nastiness in the blogosphere. I agree that personal abuse and belittling others is out of order. But sometimes it may be hard to draw the line between 'carping' and 'difference of opinion.'
My biggest problem has been finding similar sites. There are a few who have the same sort of mindset as me but not many and I have spent endless hours trawling for them. The weakness most blogs have it that they drift off topic and although I can tolerate this at Christmastime or around Thanksgiving the reason I'm reading these blogs is to hear about things appertaining to literature. I think one of the biggest causes for this is the fact that bloggers are under the illusion that they need to post daily or their audiences will abandon them. This is simply not the case. I post every three days – every now and then I'll let four slip by – but I make sure that when I do post I have a decent article ready. I use the term 'article' because that's how I think of my blog as the kind of thing that could easily appear in a newspaper.
Like you I've been known to gently chide and I've been lucky that I've not offended anyone yet. It's not that I don’t have opinions but I know that no matter what I say I'm not going to change the opinions of those people most likely to get offended by anyone's efforts to do so. My main objective is to get people to think. My most recent blog/article is on the subject of swearing. I'm not recommending it but what I am doing is asking what place it has these days, has it lost its power to shock and, if it has, what has taken its place.
You ask the question: What is a literary blog for? A literary blog is not a hammer to beat people over the head with but it is a tool and as such is limited by the medium itself and by the expertise of its user. Sculptors use hammers as do murderers. I have a certain amount of knowledge when it comes to things literary, a unique perspective (in that it is my own) and a peculiar facility with words. Hopefully this makes what I have to say interesting and thought provoking. My aim is to stimulate people and to provide a place where they know they can go and be given something to think about. I think that's enough.
Personally speaking, such comments leave me entirely unmoved. I get my own fair share of mud thrown at me as a habitual blogger, forum admin, poet and critic. So it takes rather more than the odd slur to galvanise me into barking at other bloggers like myself. But most other online poets are not that laidback.
You're a blogger. That means you should write whatever you like, within reason and the laws of libel. But if you do that, you should also expect carping from those who disagree with your content or tone.
Just don't let their comments - however unpleasant - influence you into being anyone other than yourself.