I Blame Blogs

Original artwork by Paul Killebrew

More than two blogs are created each second of every day.
There are about 1.6 million postings per day, or about 18.6 posts per second.
    —Technorati

Somewhere along the line in this country, the notion of discretion became an anachronism. After discretion fell, shame followed, all but vanishing from the cultural landscape, along with privacy, humility, and modesty.

I blame blogs.

At base, personal blogs are public diaries. Not actual diaries, filled with brutal honesty, the humiliating stuff you wouldn’t want anyone to read. No, blogs are diaries the way American Idol is “reality,” carefully pruned to present a version of life we all wish were the truth. Blogs are like personal ads—designed to seduce everyone. Hence all the pictures and lists: “10 things about me!”

Blogs, say bloggers, are supposed to make us feel more connected. They are meant to be the answer to the diaspora of intimacy that modernity has wrought, to bridge the lonely hours by creating an online community to replace the more organic, actual communities we seem to have abandoned along with paper correspondence and formal wear. If you blog, you are never alone. You are also never insignificant. (You have 500 “friends” on your blogroll!)

Problem is, most of us are insignificant. We are not all undiscovered talents, stars awaiting illumination, unrecognized geniuses, gifted children. Most of us are average folks, getting by or not, in love or not, happy or not, and the opportunity to catalog these daily ups and downs (or snark about someone else’s) is not one that should necessarily be taken. Just because you can tell the whole world about the sexy porpoise dream you had last night, doesn’t mean you should.

Of course, blogs can be seductive (like porpoises), but they are seductive in the least satisfying way. Read enough of them and they begin to feel like pornography: stirring for a bit but ultimately creepy, conflating titillation with a low-grade depression, a way to waste hours of time that could have been spent recycling or knitting or walking shelter puppies.

Instead of fostering actual connection, blogs inevitably activate our baser human instincts—narcissism, vanity, schadenfreude. They offer the petty, cheap thrill of perceived superiority or released vitriol. How easy it is to tap tap tap your indignation and post, post, post into the universe, where it will velcro to the indignation of others, all fusing into a smug, sticky mess and not much else in the end. You know those dinners at chain restaurants, where they pile the plate with three kinds of pasta and five sauces and endless breadsticks and shrimp and steak and bacon bits all topped in fresh grated cheese? Blogs are like that: loads of crap that fill you up. With crap.

Which brings us to the antidote: poetry.

Poems are like diaries too. But they are not the first draft. And generally, they do not include musings about porpoise dreams or photographs of one’s cat.

Poems are mercifully concise, tilled, and picked over. They endeavor to fold an entire experience, origami-like, into a few lines, getting to the bone/root/gut of the matter, the fat long ago diligently, privately boiled away. There is no waste in good poetry. (Kay Ryan.) No incomplete thoughts. (Richard Siken.) No incidental musing. (W.S. Merwin.) No cheese or bacon bits.

Should a poem be mundane (Frank O’Hara), it is a deliberate mundane. Elevated by discretion, style. Instead of gaping-mouthed neediness, poetry offers stillness, solace. Speaking low so the reader must lean in, must truly listen, the way a mother drops her voice to get her child’s attention, articulating every word as if it were its own planet. Poems both slow the world and explode the moment. “Never wishing itself away / unafraid of what it is / a music in a hood / a small thing / singing.” (“A Light Breather,” Theodore Roethke.)

Poems work like time-lapse photography in the brain, a lifetime of understanding blossoming from one distilled image. Poems are the secret you stumble upon that shifts every internal cylinder, tumbles your jagged self into working order, just like that. Poetry is about nothing if not empathy, generosity that can sneak up on you, that you didn’t know you needed until you found it and felt the release, like a long-forgotten thorn plucked from the pad of your foot. Ah, that feels better.

For all the so-called connectedness of a blog, nothing unites—author and reader, reader and world—more than a poem. Poetry performs a bit of a magic trick that way, taking our same troubling human instincts—the avarice, the envy, the enfeebling insecurity—and speaks about them in, as Tony Hoagland writes in Lawrence, “such a manner as to make us seem magnificent.”

Poetry forgives us. And in reading it, we can forgive ourselves.

Even for reading blogs.