The poetry news website Choriamb announced it will be hanging up its press chapeau after five years of linking to all the verse news fit to peruse. The site had been a labor of love for Tanya Angell Allen since August 2004, when she co-founded the site with Becky Rodia, according to the site’s info page.
In announcing the change from news and reviews to “something new,” Choriamb offered up the “Top Four Places to Find Poetry News” in its stead, including Jilly Dybka’s Poetry Hut, Poetry News Daily, and the Poetry Foundation’s own Dispatches page. In its description Choriamb suggested that the PoFo “seems to draw a lot from Google News,” which got me thinking about that particular new fangled clippings service, especially in relation to the previously (endlessly?) discussed Pirate Poetry Anthology.

“Google News” and/or “Google Alerts” seems to be one of the major ways word of the Pirate Anthology got around. Many poets seem to use Google Alerts or Google News to track when and where their names pop up online, and when the anthology site with all those names popped up, many poets got notification from Google, followed the link, and away we went into hundreds of comments and a lengthy discussion.
(For the uninitiated, the Google Alert service sends users an email with a link anytime a certain word or phrase appears on the web)
It is, of course, highly debatable whether or not having a Google Alert for your name is a form of arch narcissism (as was suggested in the comments back there), or just a way to keep up with yourself, which can be no small feat in this info-age.
A friend of mine, interviewing for a job outside the Poetry Sector, thought he should mention to his interrogators that he wrote and published poetry. The interviewers smirked at one another and said, “Oh yes, we know. We Googled your name. It’s standard practice.”
Yes. Since it’s standard practice, it’s not such a bad idea to try and keep track of how and when and why your name might be put to use. But what if the world is full of people with your particular name? Then, not only is there no real hope of keeping control of your good name, but for the arch narcissist any good feelings that might arise from someone talking about your work is offset by repeated reminders that your parents were not altogether original way back when.
These doppelgooglers trouble the idea of what is and is not in the self society reads. Is this a particularly contemporary concern? Did Shelley notice another Percy haunting the countryside surrounded by bailiffs and so thought: “Bugger! I guess I’ll have to be Percy Bysshe Shelley!” Or what about Ford Maddox Ford? Tanya Angell Allen? Edna St. Vincent Millay?

10.22.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (7)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 22nd, 2008 at 1:24 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.