So a question that constantly occurs to me as I write this blog is what the medium of the blog means for and does to the poetry I produce on it. This question, for me, breaks down into the following parts: what does it mean to make poetry ephemeral, as each day's poem is superseded on the front page by the next's? What does it mean, conversely, to have every poem searchable and archived? What does it mean to have so much poetry produced so quickly, and none of it edited? And finally, what does it do to have such a formal poetic form placed into the context of such a modern medium?
What does it mean to make poetry ephemeral?
This is probably the question that worries me the most, or perhaps not worries me but nags at me. I write a lot of poetry here, as you know if you take even a glance at my archive or even at the front page. But each one, whether good or bad, whether a labor of lengthy love or the work of a moment, whether precious to me or not, drops off the radar incredibly rapidly - and at the same rate. Who reads the archive? And if you do read the archive, how do you know which poem to read? In this sense, the medium portrays the poetry as if it were all created equal, which it manifestly is not. But because every poem disappears from view, never to return, there is no way to keep the best poems around, or, therefore to produce improvement in the poems by recognizing success or failure and keeping the examples of each before one's eyes. The poems become mere ripples in the stream, and lose their solid presence. Poems are meant, in some sense, to stand as "a moment's monument," in Dante's words, or "marble or the gilded monuments/of princes" in Shakespeare's. How can the poem be a monument, how can it immortalize anything, if it itself is ravaged by time, and indeed ravaged more rapidly than the physical objects to which it is compared? Does a poem lose something of its identity, of that crystalline quality that I desire it to have, if it disappears soon after its creation?
I hope, and think, the answer is that it does not. After all, if I write poetry in a book, or in a Word document, or in any other format, is it presented to the world any more than it is at the bottom of my archive here? Certainly not, and indeed, it is less available, less noticeable, less useful. Of course, if I were to write my poetry in another medium, I could collate and correct it before publishing it to somewhere it could be read by others; but equally, there would be a good chance that the poems might become permanently voided because I lost them, forgot about them, or simply refused to show them. How can this medium be considered more ephemeral than that? The apparent ephemerality of the poems is simply an artifact of the fact that all the poems I write (with few exceptions) are available here, and therefore the constant stream of them, and their constantly visible renewal, makes each one looks less important. Yet I would write the poems in any case, and they are certainly no less important and no more ephemeral here.
But, on the other hand, what does it mean to have them all archived?
The flip side of the above point is that, unlike other media, this medium provides a searchable, browsable archive of everything I've produced. Certainly from a personal standpoint this is both a good thing, as I have easy access to my work, and a frightening thing, as whatever personal truth is contained in the poems is not only publicly available, but available with its own history tagging along behind it. It is rather difficult to escape one's past in such a context. But I am more concerned here with a poetic, artistic level than a personal one, to the extent that they can be divorced, and on that side the issue is more the one identified above, that the archive is undifferentiated and therefore not ideal to use. So it is less useful than it could be; if I could find a way to differentiate the poems by quality, or by audience response (which I suppose could be achieved by comments), then the presence of the archive would become a much greater tool for poetic development. It does however tie me, however usefully, to my poetic past; it leaves the exploration of my poetic development, however achieved, open to the willing eye. At the moment this is only an archive of the past few months, along with spotted moments of My Old Sonnets, but if I continue it will grow and become both more useful and more interesting as a record of my poetic past, and of how I have developed as a poet.
What does it mean to have so much poetry, so quickly, without editing?
This jockeys with the first question for my attention, and indeed they are closely related. The role of editing in poetry is one that I have struggled with. I write my poems very rapidly, almost compulsively, and though I do edit them in the process of writing them it is very hard for me to edit them afterwards unless it is long afterwards. It is not, as it might seem to be, an issue of excess of passion, but rather an issue of being too close to the moment of creation; a sonnet that has just passed hot out of the forge of my brain needs time to cool before it can be reshaped. Or at least before I can reshape it. So in a sense, editing would not happen even if I were in another medium, just because of who I am and how I write.
Yet the blog medium is, admittedly, peculiarly unfriendly to editing, especially compared to other electronic media, such as simply typing in Word. The archive moves on so quickly, and posts that are edited themselves do not pop up on the frontpage but rather wherever the original was in the archive. So the tendency is simply to forge on, rather than to go back, and even if one does go back the edited poem is invisible unless reposted. So there is a distinct pressure to move onward, ever onward.
This in turn leads towards greatly increased poetic production in terms of numbers of poems. I have written well over three hundred sonnets for this blog. Petrarch wrote, or at least published, that many sonnets in his entire life; Shakespeare, less than half as many. This is certainly not to claim a position for myself alongside those two poets, but rather to point out the effect, in some ways, of the medium's constant push for novelty rather than reworking of old material. I am, and in some sense must be, continually presenting new sonnets and new work, and therefore exceed greatly the standards of quantitative production traditional for the sonnet. This is accelerated by the way in which the medium interacts with editing; otherwise I might perhaps spend more time producing better work out of the materials already at hand rather than creating anew.
What does it mean to have a formal, traditional form in a modern medium?
Besides the production point addressed above, the interaction of something so old, traditional, almost arcane as the sonnet with the slambang speed of the Internet interests me. This is perhaps particularly true because of the traditional approach I take to the sonnet (nothing without consistent meter and rhyme, please!). The speed and almost sloppiness allowed by the medium interact interestingly with the precision demanded by the form. I can push out the sonnet as fast as I can write it, technically speaking, but I can only write it as quickly as I can find the right words to fit the form; the form, and not the medium, is the constraint, the limiting factor, which is substantially different than it is when I write by hand, and even in some ways different than when I type into something like Word (because then there is a lag in publication, which permits more editing - see above - which in turn makes the form itself no longer the limiting factor). This has probably contributed in turn to my facility with the form, but it has also created a situation in which there is no automatic check that allows me to edit as I go along by making me pause as I compose, since the composition can flow as rapidly as it likes and be immediately posted. This in turn must have an impact on what eventually gets published, as there is less of a space for contemplation of the production either during or immediately after the process.
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