A Moment on the Medium and the Milestone

Although in my sonnet composition I have simply blown past 1,000 sonnets (much as I did with 1,000 posts), with only a first-line reference to show for it, I think now that I am somewhere slightly less round (with only two zero places and not three) I might productively take advantage of the milestone(s) to think a bit further about what this project means and has meant for me.

I love one-sentence pararaphs.

The first point that comes immediately to mind is that the pace in sonnet-blogging feels frantic; if someone has it on their Google Reader, or bookmarked it, or even might click the link to it from another page or find it by randomly googling, there's a pressure there to have a new post fairly frequently. This is not necessarily a bad thing, since it forced me through several rough patches of lowered inspiration, and allowed me to discover the degree (high) to which sonnetry seems to be a muscle that grows with exercise. Not that the feelings I express - fictional or non-fictional - become more fixed by expression, but that the idea of expression - again fictional or non-fictional - becomes focused on sonnets, and the path of expression-through-sonnet becomes easy to the point of automatic. I would have thought I was already there, given that this is far from my first foray into sonnetry, but apparently not. This reflex has been severely strengthened by this experience.

Second, the dual permanent/ephemeral nature of the blog has been fascinating to me. Every post is there, and people do go access old poems, however they get to them. But at the same time the vast majority of hits are to the front page; and poems exit that page in at most a week. So the poems are simultaneously forever and immediate. I can say that between this point and the above, the latter has had more power over me; I do not conceive of myself crafting eternal poems on a deadline. Rather, there is an urge to simply push it out into the ephemeral void. But at the same time, there is a great satisfaction to the permanency of the poems I write and like; I can look back at them, or encourage others to do so, and I know it remains. It's also a reminder when I look back at what has been read: these poems need not stand a test of time, but they could if they were good enough. They do not disappear.

Finally, for the moment, I feel like exposing my art in this focused way has been really good for my work. I appreciate everyone who reads any of these for whatever reason, and I hope you feel the same. Repeated exercise has, I think, made me a better poet; not that every poem now is better than any then, but that the average (and maybe even the height) has improved. I don't feel as bad about the worse ones or any worse about the better ones, so I'm happy with that progression. And if you read, or have read, the archives, I hope you do too.