Instead of fostering actual connection, blogs inevitably activate our baser human instincts—narcissism, vanity, schadenfreude. They offer the petty, cheap thrill of perceived superiority or released vitriol. How easy it is to tap tap tap your indignation and post, post, post into the universe, where it will velcro to the indignation of others, all fusing into a smug, sticky mess and not much else in the end. You know those dinners at chain restaurants, where they pile the plate with three kinds of pasta and five sauces and endless breadsticks and shrimp and steak and bacon bits all topped in fresh grated cheese? Blogs are like that: loads of crap that fill you up. With crap.
Which brings us to the antidote: poetry.
Poems are like diaries too. But they are not the first draft.
Allison Glock, “I Blame Blogs”
It’s always usually the Real Writers and Real Journalists who decry bloggery the most; like they can’t stand the fact that anybody can do their job now.
Poetry. I love poetry. I used to write poems like I write blog posts now— and that, if you haven’t been playing along from home, is a lot. I turned my back on it in high school because it wasn’t cool to be that earnest back then; we knew too much. I came back in college, when I fell in love with a man and with an idea of myself and the rush I got from reading stuff abou sex out loud in workshops. I took classes with Cornelius Eady and hung poetry from the trees late at night; we organized guerrilla readings at local pubs and held our last class at his house, over pizza. We were all in love. You had to be, you were 20 years old and trying to feel things, eloquently and in front of each other. He played guitar and at the end of the year I had a meeting with him, to discuss my future, of which I had no idea, no plans. I shrugged and stared at my feet and he told me I should do it, I should keep writing.
I still have one of the poems I wrote for our final project. It was about sitting on a bench in between classes, talking to the boy I liked:
I sat on the edge to seem as if I was only gathering momentum but
I never wanted to move.
I’m not sure writing this on cheesecloth in permanent maker, laminating it, then tying it to a tree next to the sidewalk where he walked to his seminar was the best way to reach out. I’m sure now I’d write it late night in an email (okay, so I did the same thing back then, too), or slip it in a blog post. I’d tell you now the important part: that I remember making this late at night with the other people in my group, and that I knicked my thumb with the pair of scissors I was using, and it was bleeding a lot, and I ran around the student union holding my thumb up, looking, desperately, for the man that this poem was about, but he had gone home.
I remember bleeding and not knowing what to do, and realizing I didn’t know who to go to for help, considered calling my mom and asking her. I ran up to acquaintances I saw who were sitting in booths studying, but they just cringed and shrugged and sent me on my way. I stood outside by some picnic tables, squeezing my thumb, and cried. Not because of the blood because I knew that this might be what life is like. Searching desperately for some type of consolation outside of yourself and finding none.
What I want to say is, it’s all the same, Allison, and if we don’t have the patience to read each other’s first drafts, well, what’s the antidote to that?
