Thanks to the Institute for the Future of the Book, I just found the results of a web survey taken by 137 serious poetry readers over at the literary environmental journal, Terrain.org. It's given me enough new material to last for a few weeks.
Here's the Institute's essay...
"There's a series of recent posts (1, 2, 3, 4) up at Ron Silliman's blog where he analyzes a recent study (by Simmons B. Buntin of terrain.org) of how people read and write poetry online. This is of interest even to those uninterested in poetry: Silliman is doing some very careful work in scrutinizing how and why people read online."
It's utterly fascinating to see exactly how a small, intelligent writing community interacts with new web content. I haven't interviewed any poets yet, and I think I need to soon. More to follow next week.
In the meantime, spend some time with Silliman's blog, he's generating a great conversation over there...
"[W]hen I read, for example, Bill Berkson’s masterful online chapbook in the current issue of Big Bridge, or when I see Norman Fischer’s “After Alberto Caeiro” in the same issue, it is evident to me at least that the upper limit of web publishing is every bit as high as it is for print..."
"[T]he web has everything, from the snooty neoformalism of William Logan to blogs devoted to slamming & the open-mic type sites like Poetry Super Highway. You want to check on the English-language poets of ? You can do it on the web. You want more content than you can find in the Library of Congress? You can do it on the web."
Cool find. Thanks Boog.
"The look & feel of online work, as well as poorly-designed websites, was the most frequent complaint."
Oh, he nailed that one... it seems a no brainer to just take the time, design the the thing well, even if you don't have the skills, nowadays its easy to find someone who does.
A lot of good writers are missing the bus on this, and therefore missing readers as they click away from the pink and aqua blue page....
"The ephemerality of the web is another issue: many websites seem to disappear as soon as they spring up,"
True, but its also true offline.
Writing is hard.
Poetry is breaking rocks with your bare hands (good poetry, that is).
Few can make the long haul over the years. But that's the thing, the years will sort us all out. One by one.
Posted by: Robert Bruce | April 29, 2006 5:39 PM | Permalink to Comment