Eyewear gets around 3,000 pageviews a day, on a good day. On a bad one, closer to 1,500. Okay - so, here's a question for you - why does almost no one leave their comments? This absence is depleting the value of the blog, I feel, and leading me to, again, think of shutting shop, or eye, as it were. COMMENT PLEASE! There, I've shouted it. Cheers.
When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart? A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional. Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were. For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ? Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets. But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ? How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular. John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se. What do I mean by smart?
Comments
No-one chooses the empty restaurant in the street to eat in.
To comment in a place where there are few comments requires a certain insensibility. We've all experienced that familiar web presence, the deadly over-commenter who comments excessively in proportion to what s/he's got to say, whose voice is heard too often - so that it threatens to compete with the blogger her/himself. That effect is magnified on blogs that attract few comments. Most of us are terrified of being that deadly person. I'm on my second comment, and I'm definitely in that uncomfortable zone right now!
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'why does almost no one leave their comments?'
I don't know, is the honest answer.
However, speaking from my own, admittedly atypical perspective and experience as a language lover schooled in the medium of extemporized online debate; the pre-moderation of comments, I have always thought, is a not insignificant reason for potential contributers feeling put off commenting.
For example, George Szirtes, a world-class old pro who, in the normal run of things, one would assume, is of the stature that automatically means he's gonna have a pre-screening of comment facility in place at his blog. That he doesn't is very telling. He doesn't have one because he is comfortable in his own skin and has not been distracted like the rest of us, into thinking we simply must have it to guarantee a civlized tenor in the debate. Like airport checks, the blogosphere is contiguous with the rise of the War on Terror, and this dominant background norm of suspicion and fear, has, I think, gradually fed into all areas of our lives, including talking about poetry, to such an extent that we went over the top with 'security' measures, on blogs that discuss poetry.
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Online, pre 9/11, the great new cyberworld was pregnant with possibility and potential. The artist had a free canvas on which to learn, make our mistakes, look idiots as we did so and maybe even gain a readership, should the gods decide it.
Slowly though, this beau ideal broke down as the temperature of the time made itself felt across the virtual realm. We arties, without any real-world danger and only words with which to get upset by, progressively assembled ourselves into, what became, the silent herds we have today. A large part of it, I think, came about because in the wild west atmposphere of an unregulated noughties poet-forum-war, the forums that were set up inevitably turned into one person power-bases, where the editorial decisions were made, not with an eye to fostering open and free speech, creating the happy clappy artistic realm we hoped for pre 9/11, but on making our poetry-power-grabs, appointing ourselves sole Moderator of forums where our talk policies merely reflect a desire to limit what others have to say, framing the rules as somehow being there not for the beneifit of ourself, but for a 'community' on whose behalf we volunteer ourselves up as selfless facilitators of sheer poetry hugs and positivity.
Obviously I am only speaking from my own experience here, but the problem, to my mind, is that this decision to screen comments on the grounds that not doing so means any potentially foul-mouthed effer and/or mental-case may come in and ruin it for everyone else; whilst on the face of it seems an acceptably intelligent (if somewhat over-cautious) reason for pre-moderating comments, is a reason that can all too often, I suspect, be used as a cover and convenient excuse to keep from the debate any text that comes into our in-tray which counters our position and/or makes us look silly, foolish or what have you.
The small team there borrowing (shamelessly stealing) what they obviously thought was a 'cool' tool to use as the arresting word in the copy and blurbs advertising the start time of their gigs. And sure enough enough people also began using it soon after for the alert to notice this cultural copy-catting. Like most things of this nature, it gradually fell out of use and all but disappeared from view a few years later, after this small and poetically informative cycle centering on the word 'sharp' ran its course, reaching an identifiable poetic completion.
So to the pre-moderating of comments. When the blogosphere first appeared with blogspot.com, for a short while comment moderation was the exception rather than the rule. The entire goal of us inchoate bloggers desperate for a community and audience (much as the goal on Facebook was getting the greatest number of 'freinds') was comment-count. Quantity rather than quality. Until bloggers like yourself took the lead and turned the premise on its head, by making an editorial decision to pre-screen comments, not, I suspect, because you had much concern about trolls, but because it was the most instinctively poetic turn to take, going against the grain. Standing apart from the rest.
And as your reader figures here testify to you being the democratic 'winner' of the online poets'-audience-gathering-competition, in short having a cachet of cool amongst your peers, following your lead, it became de riguer to have comment moderation turned on, because doing so (the theory goes) meant one was more concerned with exclusivity and our sites being forums for quality debates, rather than the less immediate but more tacky goals of then compeers and fellow competing poet-bloggers all chasing what you now possess.
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Please don't mistake this as a call to turn off comment moderation. It is merely an extemporized response to your post, based on my own time in the field as a harmless effer and occassional creator of beauty and eloquence in Letters. This after all is our goal, to write and be read.
Desmond
(The only thing that frightens me is that, come the revolution, I'll be shot for my loyalty to what some would consider to be the deeply reactionary nature of Eyewear. But I shall stand firm and, as I am led to the wall in my blindfold, I shall proudly declare my passion for the blog that has so enriched my life.)
Godspeed.