12/3/06

Blogging as the sharing of knowledge

"The deception of Poets will mark our era, as it has already marked history. On the other hand Poets will show future generations the steadiness of hope, its strength. By paraphrasing Rorty, humanity will have to accept in front of the gravity of nuclear bombs the need to develop our relationships on human values, and to recognize those who are better suited to lead governments and institutions. With the proliferation of poetry blogs, the poetic message should reach an umpteenth public, poetry is filling the medium and instead of "massaging", it disrupts."

Anny Ballardini on poetry blogs >>

4 comments:

Linh Dinh said...

Readers should check out also Anny Ballardini's Poets' Corner, http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome, a wonderful point of contact for international poets. Ballardini is herself a bilingual poet, writing in both English and Italian, and living in the bi-cultural city of Bolzano/Bozen.

Anny Ballardini said...

Thank you, to Linh Dinh and Ton van't Hof, and to Ton you must have read the entire story to reach that paragraph...

and congratulations for your new and interesting blog,

Anonymous said...

Thank you for your interesting post.

I am not an extensive reader of blogs -partly because, as some others, believing that Listserves possess, create a dynamics which Blogs devolve against.

In my admittedly limited experience, I am struck by the very small number of blog entries which elicit specific responses, the number 0 following most of them. Even Ron Silliman, for some reason not quite clear to me, shut down the response option in his blog.

That leads me to the question: is there some essential quality about poetry blogs which is against the concept of diverse community? This is not merely rhetorical but serious question, requiring considred answers.

This is not true for political blogs, for example, where polemical controversy is part of their essence. Even if a political blog is started by some with a definite political point of view, its purpose is to generate controversy.

On the other hand, many poetry blogs, from what you write, seem to thrive on "safeness," almost, not to say "a return to the womb," but a return to camaraderie.

Though friendships are very important, I come from a culture (Turkey) where poetics communities led also to a lot of generative feuds among poet friends. That's how poetry was created.

That's what I miss in poetry blogs, this incredible impulse to self-protection -with a few heroic exceptions, such as Alan Sondheim's and Myread's.

Ciao,

Murat

Anny Ballardini said...

Ciao Murat,
I am so distressed by kari edwards' departure that I am not even able to follow what you are saying. I hope this answers your question on what I wanted to depict of poetry blogs meant as a facade of what resides behind them,
take care,