Why, Hello Again! Fancy a Poem?

Ah, Harriet. How much I missed thee. Though I must confess I hesitated, partly because I don’t blog, tweet, Facebook, or whatever the kids are doing these days, simply because I value my privacy. Not that I know how much privacy I have anymore. I’m still shocked when my brother, who lives in Mexico, tells me over Skype that my eleven-year-old niece found another podcast of me on YouTube. (How droll!) I’m more outraged about how unflattering I look on video than anything else and my first response is: “I look fatter, shorter and more disabled than I really am!”I like to think that I can control the intensity of the unflattering revelations I release into the world because I deal with language, not photographs, videos or even audio. But the technology has taken over, and half the time I can’t even tell I’m being filmed or recorded. Though even email gets me into trouble when someone points out how I contradicted myself because--[insert FWD message here]--“You see? back then you said this!” Wow, what ever happened to complexity? Most unfortunate.

One of the reasons I’m so closed off is that I always imagined that instead of putting my anxieties, wonders, insights and observations willy-nilly all over the Internet, I should save them for the poetry, the story, the essay, or for occasions like this, when I can keep myself from making impulsive statements I might later regret. Like I said, at least the semblance of control is important. I can already imagine a few Facebook fiends or poet bloggers getting all defensive, but I’m not going to turn this into a fight about whether or not others should temper their cyber personas--that’s their business. Instead, I’m making this about me. (Now there’s something these folks might relate to.)

Why do I participate? Well, is there really a choice in the age of Google, when a web presence is de rigueur, when the easiest manner to gauge such intangibles as visibility, productivity, or--egads!--desirability is to consult Wikipedia? They got the 411, baby, like it or not. And I’ve consulted the site to check out a few names, I will not lie, and cringe at how one’s attempt at self-promotion and self-aggrandizing is immediately apparent. My brother read my WikiPage and he was all upset that it mentioned that our parents were deceased. “That’s personal,” he said. True, but then, I have written about it so it’s not necessarily a secret.

So here’s where it stands: I have an author web site (but I refuse to place blurbs or book review excerpts on there because I blurb and review book and the cycle makes me uneasy), I have a faux Facebook profile and only two friends I instant message (one of them lives in Taiwan), I have a Fan Page on Facebook but I don’t control the posts, and I did edit something out of my WikiPage once because I thought it was a hurtful assessment of me as a professional--I wouldn’t have bothered, but one time an event organizer printed it out and distributed it to the audience, something I didn’t want to happen again. And I’ll take the disclosure a step further: that statement said that my work as a book critic was outshining my work as a creative writer. Maybe I should put it back in because maybe it’s true.

In any case, I suppose that one benefit to coming back to Harriet--speaking through the book critic identity I now embrace--is that I get to talk about books and poetry and politics, but through a measured and finite agreement. Please, Poetry Foundation gods, don’t hire me full-time! And then I’ll step back into the shadows and simply lurk. Well, I said I didn’t write on Facebook or blogs, I didn’t say I didn’t read them. Of course, I do. I like to be in the mix. I like to see how others comport themselves. I learn from the wise and the fools give me something to chuckle about at teatime.

So get ready, lovers and haters, I’m back. And just to end on a more celebratory note rather than a threatening one, I’d like to come full circle to Mr. Carl Phillips. Just a year ago I was sitting here griping about the lack of poets of color winners of the Yale Younger Prize, and a year later I’m gratified that his first choice--also the only Latino winner in the YYP’s 106-year history--is Eduardo C. Corral, some Xicano pocho from Arizona, of all places, currently the most embattled territory on American soil. Wow. A double-win for American poetry, and a double fuck-you to polite monochromacy.

Off for a stroll, what?