I’ve replaced White Noise as the main blog on my site with Little Fury. Little Fury will be solely a po-blog, and I am hoping that getting it started may get me a little more involved in the world of po-blogs, since no reasonable discussion seems to be available through conventional discussion forums. (Just to see if I can piss people off, I posted that I am absolutely aghast at the lack of discussion about books and working poets on Absolute Write. I wonder if anyone will take that bait, or better, rise to the challenge.)

I’m going to start a blogroll and see if I can get some reciprocal link action.

In his blog today, Ron Silliman discusses margination, and the curious tendency of the Internet-age poet to keep to the left-hand margin. Says Silliman:

One wonders what the longer term implication of all this might be. It’s conceivable that in ten years’ time the web will prove as resilient and easy to set type with the sort of point-by-point variations that Paul Blackburn adapted for his late work, but right now, frankly, it’s a pain & one cannot guarantee that what looks good in Firefox will look the same in Internet Explorer or Opera or what else have you. So younger poets are doing what seems obvious enough, which is returning to the margin or else never thinking really about departing therefrom. I sometimes have the sense of a generation of swimming students, afraid to let go of the edge of the pool.

An interesting theory, to say the least, but one has to wonder if Silliman has identified the cause of the return to the left margin, or an interesting outlier. It’s certainly true that formatting work for the web is no small frustration– even an experienced web designer can be driven to fits by poems that don’t avail themselves of Dreamweaver’s four text justifications. Add to that the relative inexperience of many editors and publishers who have chosen the web as their medium, settling on a free service like Blogger as their engine for delivery, and you’re certain to see a reticence to publish poems that leap away from the margins.

Still, that has less to do with the creation of poetry than the publication of poetry, and while working poets do think about publication, I like to think that there is a sense that the cart must not come before the horse– in this case, the horse being the art of the poem. Is the vague sense that unjustified poetry (and I love the term “unjustified poetry”) might be less publishable really driving it to extinction?

Perhaps Silliman has touched on the root cause not by looking at poetry’s present, but by looking at the recent past:

The New American poets – from Olson to Ginsberg to Duncan to Whalen to Blackburn to Snyder to McClure – were the ones who really moved away from the margin. A poet like Larry Eigner is unthinkable without the typewriter. To center his poems on the page, Michael McClure (and along the way a volunteer typist or two) had to count out the characters in every line and count backwards from the center space. Today, that’s a simple Control-C in Microsoft Word, so simple in fact that the practice appears to have declined in recent years.

Let us consider that poetry is often subject to what is fashionable at any given time (Tony Hoagland’s essay in the March issue of Poetry covered this very eloquently with regards to narrative). The New American poets were certainly driving each others’ work to new levels of experimentation, rejecting a number of the “staples” of the previous generation’s poetry. If the pendulum swung far to the left for them, perhaps we are seeing the correction in contemporary poets’ faithfulness to left-justification– a swing back to the far right.

This suggestion is borne out by print publications, and I don’t think there’s any arguing that print publications still cast far longer shadows than internet publications. We dream of seeing our poems in print, and merely accept their presence online as a means of distribution. And left-justification is the primary mode in most major print magazines right now. Flip through a copy of last year’s Best American Poetry and tell me what you see. Given that formatting text for print has, as Silliman notes, become a relatively easy task, one might expect to see an explosion of poems that eschew the left margin; yet, few have been welcomed into the ranks of today’s finest poems.

The relative ease of formatting may also have something to do with current passions. When centering text is as easy as Ctrl + C, it is easy for the modern poet to dismiss centering a poem as gimmicky. In fact, given the relative ease with which we can play linguistic games– we have programs to count our words, to count our characters, to inspect our grammar, to easily manipulate margins and styles– the appearance of gimmickry is difficult to avoid for the modern poet who dares experiment. We cannot share in McClure’s obsessions with counting characters, because it is difficult to obsess about a simple, automated process. Simply put, what poets of the previous generation saw as a unique and difficult challenge, contemporary poets see as province of the word processor, not the province of the artist.