Blogs are arguably the most important means for a poet to communicate with their audience, important because of the intensity and singularity of what they contain, the blog, in a manner of speaking, is a poem in progress. They provide a means by which one may observe the manner in which a poet writes his or her own life.

Today, over on Silliman’s Blog, Ron offers the following.

I, for one, would be surprised if even one in ten poets were publishing a weblog. One in twenty, maybe. Of course the implication of that when aligned with the 530-plus names on the list to the left [Ron’s Blogroll] would be something on the order of 10,000 currently active poets.

As blogs, and by extension Poet’s blogs continue to grow, their growth will coincide with critical acknowledgment, if not acceptance, of the precinct of the blog as art.

As Ron Silliman has made clear, Poet’s blogs mark a profound shift of attitude, and are helping to make that shift happen. In my opinion, they have about them a canon-forming authority, much in the same way that the small magazines once did. However, in the age of the blog, the small magazine lamentably is made less relevant — an unfortunate side effect of the blog, perhaps.

Inspired by today’s post over on Silliman’s Blog, I dug up some old notes from a long dead post called, “Blogroll as Social Logic”. Like Ron, (The Permanently Curious Type), I’ve always been interested on the effect that blogging will have and has had on poets and poetics.

Recently Jesse Glass and I set about creating a blogroll for Ahadada Books. For the uninitiated, a blogroll is a collection of links on the home page of a weblog that point to sites that are somehow related. They serve several purposes, they direct readers to the sites that are important to you, and serve as a set of bookmarks for you. Moreover, they also help build page rank in search engines for sites you wish to bestow page rank on.

Since Jesse and I started this blog last October, we have spent a lot of time surfing through blogs that dealt with poetry and poetics, and there are thousands!

A few years ago, as the term blog was just entering the vernacular (as well as the verb google) I copied a quote from Brian Kim Stefans, which I don’t think exists on the web today, so I’m glad I saved it:

Blogaholism continues to claim victims among the unwitting poetry community, with the roster: international, avant-garde, new formalist, new vineyardist, skanky, Spanish and English; ever growing for the fashionable poetaster’s blogroll

As more poets answer the call of the weblog, it becomes more difficult to determine which sites to include […]

In his thesis, LitWEBerature, Terrell Neuage posits that:

“This multiple views effect on narration opens up literature to many interpretations of the same text. With alternate routes, there is a never ending array of possibilities”.

But, where hypertext links are for the most part helpful, Neuage envisions an “exponential problem of too many links with just too many endings available to ever attempt to use just one”.

Well, as a group we’ve arrived at that “exponential problem”. With so many poets, and so many blogs available, which poets does the community of bloggers feel worthy of inclusion?

Thomas Erickson, in his fine article, The World Wide Web as Social Hypertext, writes that personal homepages, and by association, blogs, are being used not only to convey information, but to construct identity. He writes:

It is this that leads me to characterize the World Wide Web as a social hypertext. The nodes . . . are becoming representations of people. And this, in turn, enables another critical feature to emerge: links from a personal page often point to socially salient pages. A common feature of the personal page is a list of pointers to “interesting people and places.” What and who counts as interesting? Thus, the links . . . embody a sort of social logic, providing us with a view of that person’s network of friends, colleagues, and concerns.

Writes Ross Mayfield:

People use weblogs in different modes: Publishing, Communication and Collaboration. By dramatically lowering the cost for these modes on the public internet — they are rapidly increasing the value of social capital.

Thus bloggers are acutely aware that social capital starts to appear as people get together (favours swapped, debts owed) and the same can be said for norms and traditions.

So how do we, as poets, writers, and bloggers, define who and what we include in and on our blogs? With whom do we portray ourselves? Well, instead of using a search engine such as Google, we happen upon a new kind of search strategy, navigating from one blog to another, discovering who recommends what, and deciding whether or not their content is suitable in constructing our own online identity.

In Social Networking in Radiospace, John Udell writes:

Other modes of online social interaction take place in shared public spaces — newsgroups, web forums — where group identity is explicit. If you post to borland.public.delphi.webservices.soap or microsoft.public.xml.soap, you are clearly affiliating yourself. Blogging works differently. Each weblog is an individual public space. Affiliation is subtle and implicit.

Thus, groups are defined fuzzily and grouped loosely — and, as a result, blogging proves that the blog is the message. Blogs feel at once personal and definitive. That’s because they reflect the growth of the person who put it together and continues to build it, as well as those blogs that the poets reads and cares to comment on.