Silliman's Blog

If you look at the chart at the bottom of the note from Tuesday, you will see that Simmons B. Buntin gave his survey takers just six choices when he asked them what they liked about online resources. Conversely, however, when he turned the question around, asking them what they liked least about online resources, Buntin left it open ended. He got, as a result some 114 answers, which he was able to group reasonably well into some three dozen master categories. But again, six categories predominated, groupings that were listed by nine or more respondents each – no other grouping had more than four. As the chart below suggests, five of the six “least liked” aspects of online poetry resources have to do with the aspects of online technology, only one with the quality of the work online, as such.

One might quibble as how much of the look & feel of online publications is due strictly to the technology (think of the formal constraints blogs face) vs. people having to learn a whole new discipline when contrasted with either offset or (better still) the type case drawers of letterpress technology. Or, for that matter, the overwhelming amount of work that’s available online – is that a feature of the web, or merely a secret that the web has revealed?

Having read several books – from Hardt & Negri’s Empire to Robert Duncan’s H.D. Book to, most recently, The Da Vinci Code (about which more anon), in e-book format on various Palm Pilots, one of the things I appreciate most about the new technology is its extremely portable nature – it’s lighter & more versatile than a hardback & even most paperbacks. But I have yet to see a good conversion of poetry’s spacing in a PDF file from a PC (where it will be absolutely perfect) to a pocket device. So, yes, the limitations are real, at least for the present.

When asked what the biggest misconception people have about poetry appearing online, at least 85 of the 103 responses were variants of the “online poetry is not as good as poetry in print” theme. Some of this no doubt is the absence of certain older poets from the online scene. Some of it is the inept use of HTML¹ some journals evidence. Some of it is the sense that certain mags online have had of printing anything and everything they get. And more than a little of this has to do with sites that get abandoned, or which fail to get updated, even as the zine promises the Spring ’03 issue is just around the corner. There is an interesting & fairly complex discussion to be had as to what happens exactly when an active site goes dark.

But when I read, for example, Bill Berkson’s masterful online chapbook in the current issue of Big Bridge, or when I see Norman Fischer’s “After Alberto Caeiro” in the same issue, it is evident to me at least that the upper limit of web publishing is every bit as high as it is for print.

We see these same somewhat conflicting messages again when Buntin what the “biggest truth” about poetry appearing online is. There were 104 responses, which he was able to cluster together into 35 basic groups, but again just four accounted for a substantial majority of the replies. The most common, cited 23 times, was that online poetry is that it achieves broad geographic distribution – it is more readily accessible than any print journal ever could be. But the second most commonly cited response – this is from an open-ended question, Buntin didn’t ask his respondents to pick from a list – is something of a perpendicular argument, taking a similar position but in a completely different direction: 13 folks noted that there is much greater exposure to a greater range of genres, commentary, and writers. Unlike the chain bookstore that carries mostly trade and university presses, or the small press cornucopia like Woodland Pattern that carries the absolute inverse of what you find at Borders, the web has everything, from the snooty neoformalism of William Logan to blogs devoted to slamming & the open-mic type sites like Poetry Super Highway. You want to check on the English-language poets of South Africa? You can do it on the web. You want more content than you can find in the Library of Congress? You can do it on the web. Ten years ago, most poets who wrote deeply School of Quietude or radically post-avant poetries might not have had any exposure to one another. The statement “I used to write that way because I didn’t know any better,” a line I hear a lot from poets of a certain age, may very well be abolished as an excuse as a result.

But the next two commonly cited responses show us the conflict people have about the web directly. Twelve respondents commented that “Quality on the web varies widely,” while ten responded “Quality on the web is as good as it is in print.” Only one of these statements can be true in any deep sense of that term, but I think it’s an argument that you can hear both sides of, and that the line between one and the other is constantly being renegotiated. The long-term trend is that, in another decade at the very most, quality on the web should be utterly indistinguishable from quality in print, at least with regard to journals. Already the idea that an appearance in Poetry would have more value than one in Jacket is naïve at best.

The final four questions in Buntin’s survey reiterate themes already highlighted. Asked what additional poetry resources should be online, respondents generally asked for more, more, more of everything. In particular, audio resources, video resources, a centralized – and comprehensive – poem search engine linked to a far more complete inventory of texts by poets past & present. One senses that there is a fairly deep need for the work of writers who may be out of print, but still “in copyright” to be added onto the web. There have been a couple of repositories of out-of-print books, mostly in PDF format, but the logistics of a major repository obviously would be daunting. Similarly, the problems of web sites going dark and the lack of in copyright resources show up again in response to a request for “overall concerns about publishing on the web.” So does the debate over quality & the despair at just how much quantity there is already. That’s an interesting double-bind – there’s more poetry on the web than you will ever be able to read, but it doesn’t include, say, William Carlos Williams’ The Wedge or Robert Creeley’s Words, which might be the exact works you are looking for.

One person noted in the “additional comments” section that many print journals maintain “teaser” sites with a poem or two online to encourage you to acquire back issues. Those are a form of online publishing, of course, but basically they’re bad marketing. A press like Coach House that tends to put up entire books from its backlist and to treat the web as an interactive archive of its print efforts is far more likely to be the way presses are representing themselves on the web in a few years.

There was one question asking for recommendations, most of which were pretty standard words to the wise, e.g., Don’t enter competitions. One that did jump out at me was the suggestion that responding to blogs is a good way to get known. Curiously, tho, nobody mentioned that having a blog of your own has become the fastest and most popular method, a fairly interesting twist for a medium that is itself barely five years old. And one person, thinking no doubt of the issues of inept web design and programming, recommends keeping the formatting issues to a minimum. Someone else, of course, took exactly the opposite approach, suggesting that you take note of the fact that the web is, by definition now, multimedia.

¹ As has been mentioned more than once in the comments stream here over the past couple of years, I’m obviously a primitive when it comes to web design myself.

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