I am about to pivot to a more reflective and prosaic mode on Dayword, still focused on poetry but withholding new poems of my own for awhile. The happy news is that I’m returning to Athens, where among experiences to come I will be working on a poetry collection. The process demands some withholding, to let the work become itself without arbitrary exhibitionism. If you’re in Athens in the next two months and happen to have a bottle of wine, you can hear some.
Speaking of arbitrary exhibitionism, and while we’re navel gazing, I confess this is my greatest disappointment since starting this blog — the discovery that 99% of the stuff tagged as poetry online turns out to be exactly this, viz., exhibitionist navel-gazing. There are two kinds of posts that flow through my poetry-focused Threads feed every day.
The first: a poem that is entirely in first-person and entirely about why the person writing it is a poet, what poetry is, how poetic everything is. I’m supportive of such beginnings in community, but in an online channel it makes me simply tune out. It’s very rare that a poem shows up on my feed that actually displays devotion to the craft of poetry, rather than devotion to projecting a poetic identity, with simple diary-affirmation utterances broken by extra line breaks.
The second: a post about connecting with poetry community and other poets. Lots of keywords. Possibly a mystical invocation of “the algorithm”. Often some other specific virtual-tribal criteria to encourage matching along confirmation-bias bubble. I started often clicking through to see the authors of these kinds of posts, hoping they would actually lead to people posting interesting work. However mostly I see no posts, or posts like those mentioned above, more a call for a strange network of hobby affirmation than a call for a network of artists.
I’m not expecting online culture to change too much. The best way to find a variety of voices of people actually devoted to the craft of poetry is still in personal gatherings in your community or in your travels. That in-person community does allow room for the personal identity affirmation, and the beginner’s attempts, while also being more focused on those with some actual quality work to share.
Still, if anyone in the online poetry labyrinth comes across this and has noticed the same — or not noticed, but sees, yeah, it could be improved — maybe the muse-signal-to-omphalic-noise ratio in our feeds will start to ascend a little.