Blog Lit?

One of the earliest posts to this blog raised the (to me) disturbing possibility of the future existence of a book called The Collected Blog Posts of Joseph Harrington. Well, that frightening prospect is not as outlandish as it may first appear. Aside from the obvious growth of blogzines in recent years, there is the additional possibility for blog books. There are already examples of books that originally appeared as/on blogs - from Caleb Crain's The Wreck of the Henry Clay to Michael Magee's My Angie Dickinson.

But how many books have made use of the blog form itself - the reverse chronology, informal voice, comments, links, etc.? There's Susan Schultz' Dementia Blog, but beyond that, I come up short. I mean, sure, it's a new medium, but c'mon! How many new writers are born every minute? It's a geometrical curve, for sure, that's all I know.

This issue is of importance to me for two reasons. First, this blog is mostly about blogs. And literature. So, finding a latter that uses the former as an organizing principle is an exciting prospect. Two, I'm trying to advise an MFA student who is writing an MFA thesis en forme du blog. What should she read??

So, dear reader: Where is the BlogPo? Or Blog lit, writ large? Give me titles - or leads - anything!

Thank you for your attention.

On Literary (and Political) Consensus

“I have written of a cult of ‘American consensus’ that rose up among the punditocracy [in the 1940s and 50s] . . . their fervent imagining . . . that America was united and at peace and would forever be, if only ‘extremists’ stopped stirring up the pot. And I have written about the kind of intellectual self-repression it took to believe this . . . America is divided and will always be. It is not too much to suggest that the rages that accompanied the crumbling of this myth of consensus, as the furies of the 1960s advanced, would not have been so rageful – would not have been so literally murderous – had the false rhetoric of American unity not been so glibly enforced in the years that preceded it: that some of the 1960s anger and violence was a return of what America had repressed.”

- Perlstein, Rick. Nixonland. NY: Scribner, 2008. 747.


“What does it mean to break down the traditional-experimental split [in poetics]? What are the implications of a traditional and experimental hybrid that claims to overcome division and speak with one voice?

“. . . If, as Filreis writes, ‘rhetoric about poetic form was often unacknowledged Cold War politics,’ then what sort of unacknowledged politics is the rhetoric of the hybrid?”

- Ehlers, Sarah. “US Poetry and the Politics of Form” [rev. of Counter-revolution of the Word, by Alan Filreis]. Against the Current, May/June 2009, p. 40.

The Lack-of-Food Network

My vieja spends a fair amount of time watching the Food Network. Which gave me an idea for a new reality show: The Lack-of-Food Network (or call it the Food Scarcity Network). Anyway, the idea would be a cable channel that would broadcast nothing but shows about people who are chronically hungry and malnourished - preferably shows hosted by people who are chronically hungry and malnourished (and under military attack, as that seems to go with the territory). And it would be the only cable channel anyone could receive between the hours of 5 and 7 pm. "Iron Non-Chef: Darfur." "Ace of Let-them-Eat-Cake." "Body Flay."

Doesn't the BBC News have their own cable network in the US? I guess that would pre-empt this idea.

All the food is to make you forget about all the people without food. All the war is to make you forget about your weight.

All of which makes me want to listen to Lily Allen. Non apetit!

Mark Nowak on KKFI in KCMO

Just wanted to call your attention to the interview with poet-organizer Mark Nowak on this week's Heartland Labor Forum, Thursday, August 13, on KKFI-FM, 90.1. His segment runs at 6:30 pm apparently (the show is 6-7) - it's a show on new labor lit (esp. related to coal mining, such as Mark's new book of poetry/mixed-genre writing and photos, Coal Mountain Elementary, Coffee House Press - which you should check out, if you haven't already). You can also listen on your computer - and apparently, they rebroadcast the show on Friday.

Poets on Modernist Women Poets?

Here's what I want to know, poetry fans: What is your favorite essay, by a poet, written in the last 15 years, on any of the following poets: Stein; Millay; Loy; Moore; HD; (Riding) Jackson; Boyle; Rukeyser; Bennett; or H. Johnson?

Winners will be featured on the front page of this site.

The buzz now is all about whether or not Barrry O. wants to raise taxes on persons earning under $250K/yr. (thereby breaking a campaign promise).

What I want to know is whether or not Barry O. wants to raise taxes on persons (artificial and natural) earning more than $250K/yr. - esp. those earning more than $250 million/yr. - you know, the kind of persons who bundle $100K's in campaign contributions to politicians.

Actually, scratch that. I don't want to know.

Jen Humphrey's _Up From the Ground_

I would like to call your attention to Jen Humphrey’s blog, Up From the Ground (which is now a fixture under “Blogs ‘We’ Like,” right). Jen is the Director of Communications for the Natural History Museum at the University of Kansas (which also houses the Center for Biodiversity). She is also a (new) farmer and an MFA student.

Over the next year (at least), Jen will be writing her MFA thesis on-line – qua blog. Naturally, it will involve communications, nature, and farming. But I think it will be different from other blogs on those various topics, in that she is becoming ever more aware of the possibilities and limitations of the Blog Form – and how it might intersect with farming. For one thing, I and her other committee members are going to comment on the blog on the blog – thereby becoming part of the blog/thesis. Hell, you can comment on the blog and become part of her thesis! To add to the recursive fun, I fully expect that she will read this blog post, which is a reflection on her reflections on her blog. And she may even comment.

I pointed out to Jen (f2f, can you believe it??) that writing is a technology – and one that was first used to record agricultural produce. All that's left of that Sumerian millet are those clay tablets. (One thing I forgot to suggest is that she speak to a 21 c. Large Producer or two – about how they use communications technology; Jen and Jess are just a few acres and goats).

I also mentioned the potential open ended-ness of the blogosphere (which is really more pear-shaped, in my imagination). Unlike the Traditional Essay, blog posts do not have to achieve Closure. They can be part of a series; they can include links that take you away from them; they can invite comments that become part of them; and there is always the possibility of more to come – even if there is a long hiatus between posts. Blogs never end – either spatially or temporally. Until the coal runs out, anyway.

(Here in Lawrence, we have one of the top-ten greenhouse-gas emitters in the country, in the form of the power plant that is producing electricity for the very words I am typing now. Unlike the blogosphere, the ecosphere really is a closed system.)

All of this self-reflection is crucial, of course, because what is a bigger corn-pone stereotype than being a farmer in Kansas? People in Kansas, like people everywhere, begin to take on the characteristics, interests, and language of what they are supposed to be like. You should hear me talk in reverent tones about my connection to the local landscape. I can even do it in a Bob Dole/Pat Roberts twang.

Anyway, be part of the project. Visit the blog.

Thankfully, there is now a consulting firm to assist aspiring AWP panel proposers.

I should say, by way of clarification, that I don't think what Susan Schultz has in mind is civil disobedience, per se. I get the impression that she's thinking more Dick Tuck than Bruce Franklin (or Donald Segretti).

Barbaric AWP (?)

Susan M. Schultz recently posted on her blog (Tinfish Editor's Blog) a postmortem of some recent panel proposals for the AWP (Association of Writers and Writing Programs) convention next year. She laments the conservative nature of the AWP, when it comes to innovative writing, and she's issuing a call for "guerilla poetry action," a la the kind of thing described in Jules Boykoff's and Kaia Sand's Landscapes of Dissent: Guerrilla Poetry and the Public Sphere.

I'm reminded of the account, in Paul Lauter's and Louis Kampf's The Politics of Literature: Dissenting Essays on the Teaching of English (Pantheon, 1972), of the left radical takeover of the MLA in 1968. I wonder how many young scholars realize the role that civil disobedience (and just plain "talking back") played in opening up that organization to feminist, historicist, political literary criticism, not to mention study of "ethnic" literatures. And before that, the New Critics took it over from the philologists. Perhaps the AWP is ripe for this kind of thing, just at the moment when a new avant-garde is ascendent in the literary world - and when it is provoking a reaction by the conservators of the style of 50 years ago.

Poetry and Cultural Studies

That sounds like "oil and water" to a lot of people. And my contribution in the new Poetry and Cultural Studies: A Reader (U. of Illinois) explains why. But, really, this project, from Maria Damon and Ira Livingston, has been long anticipated b/c it will fill an enormous gap in the literature - esp. for the classroom. As the table of contents shows, they include everyone from Wordsworth to Frankfurt to Today, giving "cultural studies" a broad purview - and including lots of definitions of poetry in the process. Hopefully this book will make more younger scholars realize that, yes, poetry is a part of the same cultural-historical narrative that fiction critics have been talking about lo these many years.