Still mulling the discussion on what's so despicable about blogging.

For starters, it goes against the poetic economy of scarcity -- only so many "good" poems, therefore only so many good "poets," about whom it is important to know as little as possible as long as possible. This model of the poetic economy favors secrecy and reserve -- the Anglo stereotype -- while also creating an opportunity for confessors, the jester escape valve etc.

Now, I happen to believe some aspects of the scarcity model -- we only have so much time alive, and for whatever sociobiologicoeconomic reasons, when they're in working order our attentions seem to gravitate toward stimulation: sex, outlandishness, beauty, in that order.

I break with the scarcity model vis a vis availability: if say James Schuyler'd had a blog, I doubt it would have damaged my enjoyment of The Morning of the Poem. (It will be objected: Keeping a blog might have destroyed Schuyler's ability to generate a book-length work. I doubt it. Look at the journals, the letters.)

One aspect of poetic debate that goes unremarked is that any comment about the art is immediately transformed by listeners into a demand upon all practitioners. It's possible to imagine a sensitive soul who regards my keeping a blog every day as a rebuke to all writers who either don't write online or if they do, publish on a different schedule. From time to time I have a comic book vision of all the poets of the nation enslaved to computer terminals, copper-topping out ephemeral stanzas and notes on the weather for the benefit of an a.i. uberpoet. It passes.

What can a poetics be but an attempt to identify what about the experience of reading poetry draws us in. That's not a rhetorical question, though I have left off the interrogative mark. I know what poetics have been: descriptions of possible worlds, blueprints for social change, landscapes of isolation chambers.