Blogs, by Marianne Moore

[Just another stupid reflection on blogs, created for the Buffalo Poetics List which seems to be having a big toho bohu about blogs (again).]

            I too, dislike them: there are things that are important beyond all
                                                                                                this fiddle.
                   Reading them, however, with a perfect contempt for them,
                                                                                                one discovers that there is in
                         them after all, a place for the maudlin.
                   Minds that can't grasp an imaginary turd, findings
                        that make the eyes dilate, hair
                              on neglected parts of the body, these things
                                                      are important not because a

            blogger's high sounding "interpretation" can be put upon them,
                                                                                                but because they are
                   free. When they become so mundane as to become ad hominem
                         well, the same thing may be said for
                                    -- well, some of us, that we
                        "do not criticize what we
                              don't understand": the bat held upside down in quest of
                                                      some balls, the balls

            eating elephants, elephants putsching, a wild horse taking a
                        tireless wolf under a tree (now that's
                  unusual, yet the immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse
                        that takes a flea under a tree is a base-
                              ball fan, a statistician -- oops, I think I was blogging...
                  again)
                              -- nor is it valid to discriminate against
                                                      "business documents and

            school-books": all these "phenomena" are important (if secondary).
                                                                                                One must make
                  a distinction: when dragged into prominence by half-bloggers,
                        the result is not blogging, but "writing" -- nor till
                  the bloggers among us, "hyperventilators of
                              criticism," above insolence and triviality and
                                                      a loyal fan base, can

            present for public indigestion, revolutionary values with
                        real poets in them, shall we have
                  um, them. In the meantime, if you demand on one hand,
                        the raw material of blogs in all their obtuse, necrophiliac,
                                                                                                pretentious
                              grace, and that which is on the other hand
                        genuine, then you are interested in blogging.
                                                      I suggest you try www.blogspot.com.

Posted by Brian Stefans at February 27, 2003 05:27 AM