Comments on: Talking in Public

By: Michael Robbins

Michael Robbins — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 23:51:15 +0000

Been looking for this, still relevant a decade later, with issues surrounding online "communities" (I use the term very skeptically) still largely unresolved, & functioning parameters still largely inchoate: http://www.flashpointmag.com/skanky0.htm

By: Emily Warn

Emily Warn — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 17:25:12 +0000

Dear Lydia, Michael and Jilly,
Thanks for your thoughts. The discussion on Harriet these past few days, especially the one following Mark Nowak’s “Canon Fodder” post, cannot easily be characterized as “toothless” or blandly centrist. To the contrary! But it has made me nervous.
The simultaneously personal and impersonal nature of the blog leads, I think, to constructing “intellectual disagreements” that can be more cutting than one would make in person. I also think this new form of public debate, invented by a new technology, is still in search of its purpose, much as poetry always is. Insert “blog” in this poem by Stevens, which when published during WWII was “new” but now is “canonical:
“The ‘blog’ of the mind in the act of finding
What will suffice. It has not alwas had
To find: the scene was set; it repeated what
Was in the script.
The theatre was changed
To something else. Its past was a souvenir.
It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place.
It has to face the men of the time and to meet
The women of the time. It has to think about war
And it has to find what will suffice. It has
To construct a new stage. It has to be on that stage
And, like an insatiable actor, slowly and
With meditation, speak words that in the ear….”
(”Of Modern Poetry”)
Emily

By: Jilly

Jilly — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 18:29:07 +0000

I fear you are rendering Harriet toothless.

By: Michael Robbins

Michael Robbins — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 01:08:55 +0000

I pretty much agree with Lydia! I think one needs a thick skin, not only on the internet, but in any public forum. People get worked up & they express their intellectual disagreements with vehemence. But they’re intellectual disagreements! At the end of the day, I assume we all wish one another well — disagreeing with someone about some facet of poetry is not, I wish it were needless to say, a reflection of personal animosity. I presume this is something everyone who’s ever posted on this site anything snide or harsh or sarcastic or cutting would sign on to.
But things could be worse! For a serendipitous look at what sort of post moderators have to write on sites dedicated to actually popular culture rather than fusty old poems, check this: http://www.avclub.com/content/blog/why_we_delete_comments_and_how_you

By: Lydia Olidea

Lydia Olidea — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 17:10:33 +0000

Emily, thank you for the clarification. Speaking for myself, I find I’m more aggravated by self-promotional posts than combative ones (”I wrote about this in my book…,” “Let me direct you to a conversation I had with…,” “Here are some passages written after I met…” — that sort of thing). But of course some degree of civility is also to be maintained.
The risk, it seems to me, is that Harriet, because of its size and its institutionality (is that even a word?) and the fact that it’s a paid enterprise, confronts the inevitable gravity of the center, of a PG-13-ness of affect. Reasoned discourse is desirable and often informative. A let’s-not-risk-offense policy leads toward homogenization, which frankly is already what Harriet’s doubters suspect is the place’s nature. I fear that for Harriet to establish itself as independent of market mores and as something other than a casbah for bland centrism, a certain amount of roiling waters will have to be allowed and even encouraged. Surely poets can take it?