Remarks on the retirement of Jonathan Morse, 3 May 2019

Our scripture for today comes from T.S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” 1919.

"Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense . . . and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order."

******

And later in the essay:

"There remains to define this process of depersonalization and its relation to the sense of tradition. It is in this depersonalization that art may be said to approach the condition of science. I, therefore, invite you to consider, as a suggestive analogy, the action which takes place when a bit of finely filiated platinum is introduced into a chamber containing oxygen and sulphur dioxide."

This quotation is significant, both because Jon Morse began his career as a scientist, and because he went to school to become a Modernist and scholar of T.S. Eliot (and everything else). He worked for Eli Lilly from 1964 to 1973 (as a microbiologist), and returned to school to get a degree in English from Indiana University. He taught at Wayne State from 1973-1977, and then came to Hawai’i. And the rest, as they say, is now history. History, I might add, its operation in language and by way of image, has been his primary obsession as a writer and professor.

Jon Morse came to my house years ago to deliver a book or some photographs. He got down on the living room floor and took a photograph of our cat, Tortilla. Tortor was part of a tradition; he had been Gaye Chan’s cat for 10 years, before he became ours. The photograph of him by Jon became a painting by my mother-in-law, Anne Waters. When I look at Tor’s painting, I think of layers of history that include Jon as an important catalyst. He was the finely filiated platinum, the catalyst, for this feline memory.

Jon proved a catalyst for many of his students, as well as becoming a vital part of their histories. One student we shared long ago, Louis Bliemeister, brought me a bowl he’d made to represent “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” He later renovated both our bathrooms (there ARE jobs for English majors!), and wrote this to me today apropos of Jon’s influence: “his passion for everything written, from Gilgamesh to Pinter, helped instill a lifelong passion for words in me."

For the past many years, Jon has maintained a blog called The Art Part, on which he writes about old photographs, history, art, and on which he puts pictures of his cats, with titles like . . . "Victorian prosody: the Laureate discovers a rhyme for 'crannies'”--the photographis of a cat that resembles Tortor, his face pressed against a cracked cement wall.

This blog continues his long engagement with literature and history. I returned to his 1990 Cornell UP book, Word by Word: The Language of Memory, this past week. I suppose the book was sold as “literary criticism,” but it strikes me as more a meditation on language and history by way of literature. It’s a very smart book, sure, but it’s also a wise one.

At both the beginning and the end of this remarkable book—whose range of references is stunning—Jon quotes Wallace Stevens’s poem, “The Idea of Order at Key West,” the one whose central figure is a woman walking beside the sea, ordering the world in her song. In the introduction he writes this paragraph, which I will use as a farewell into a happy and productive future for Jon:

“To enchant is to cast a spell over by means of song. A song is a sound that can come to its measured end. Now that we know it is over, we can sing it in the past tense, as history. We make history of ourselves, word by word. And as that history passes through us on its way to the past tense, we shape ourselves around its words. And that is why readers continue to read the life of Emily Dickinson. They know their history. They know that history can tell us only one thing, but that one thing is enough. History tells us this: At the end of the story, we can begin to mean.”

Welcome to meaning’s onset, Jon Morse!

"In God's name don't think of it as Art": On first (belatedly) reading _Let Us Now Praise Famous Men_, by James Agee

To give them as they were and as in my memory and regard they are. If there is anything of value and interest in this work it will have to hang entirely on that fact. James Agee

__________

When I put James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men on the reading list for Spring, 2012's Documentary Poetry course, I had not yet read the book. I am only two-thirds of the way through as I write this. More precise than almost any book I've read--the lists of animals, of clothing, of furniture, are astonishing--Agee's style cycles between Whitman and Faulkner and a rural Ginsberg, between Objectivism and raw subjectivity. He ushers in C.D. Wright's South decades before she began to write her prescient books. Reading it feels at times like being a hamster in a wheel; all the pressure is to move forward quickly, traveling back again and again to a starting point that disappears as quickly as it reasserts itself.

I expected the documentation; what I did not expect were the extended, sometimes self-corroding, sometimes transparently self-justifying, episodes of poetics. It's a self-defending artifact, doing and then reasoning about the doing. I want to think more about this reasoning because it opens a space from which to teach documentary poetry and prose. More than that, Agee brings together the actual, the ordinary, the factual and the spiritual, the intangible, the sacred, in ways few other documentary poets do. Using a word introduced to me by Leonard Schwartz, I will say that Agee is a "sobjectivist," finding subjectivity in the objects of the southern tenant world, and a need for precise, objectivist description in the persons of that world. If he loses the political force of using the few to represent the many, and so to press for change, he gains the moral force of thickly describing particular places and the people who fight to live there. While acknowledging that the ambition of his project takes him outside the provenance of language, he writes: "yet in withholdings of specification I could but betray you still worse" (89).

Nowhere does the perceived gap between material fact and spiritual presence seem as great as in situations like the those Agee describes, inventories, catalogues, details, worries over. He is writing about people who are dirt poor, whose houses offer only partial shelter against the elements, who do not own the land they work or most of the proceeds from it. To find beauty here can seem condescending, demeaning, naive. How to make it otherwise is one of Agee's central projects. Here he describes himself as a "cold-laboring spy," who

shines quietly forth such grandeur, such sorrowful holiness of its exactitudes in existence, as no human consciousness shall ever rightly perceive, far less impart to another: that there can be more beauty and more deep wonder in the standings and spacings of mute furnishing on a bare floor between the squaring bourns of walls than in any music ever made: (117)

Beauty to a tenant farmer is either impossible or it's a decoration taken from advertising and applied to the walls near the fireplace. Agee devotes a page and a half to the "pretty things" the Ricketts put on their walls. Ad copy tries to sell you expensive things, but it's cheap art. Agee is not, as he tells us over and again, interested in art; he wants some notion of the real to come through in his writing. And that real is beautiful, more beautiful than art. And so the houses are beautiful:

It is my belief that such houses as these, approximate, or at times by chance achieve, an extraordinary 'beauty.' In part because this is ordinarily neglected or even misrepresented in favor of their shortcomings as shelters; and in part because their esthetic success seems to me even more important than their functional failure; and finally out of the uncontrollable effort to be faithful to my personal predilections, I have neglected function in favor of esthetics. (177)

The moral problem becomes clear later, when Agee asserts that the house's beauty is set against its "economic and human abomination," but "that one is qualified to insist on this only in proportion as one faces the brunt of his own 'sin' in so doing and the brunt of the meanings, against human beings, of the abomination itself" (178). There's no purity here, no Wallace Stevens's-like elevation of poverty into abstraction. It's as if, in Agee's terms, poverty descends rather than ascends into beauty. And that's a problem. Agee's hatred for "reformers" is perhaps due to a sense that they, like Stevens, abstract their focus rather than materialize it. He refers to this as the movement to "Improv[e] the Sharecropper" (189). On the other hand, it's hard to sympathize with Agee's attacks on rural electrification (he loves lamps!) and on the toilet, for the American obsession with "sterility" to which it testifies.

The extent to which we need to elevate "abominations" into livable conditions, while acknowledging the beauty of these abominations is an unsolvable problem. The tent city on the sidewalk beside Old Stadium Park in Honolulu poses the same question. The tent city across from K-Mart off Nimitz is another. The line of tents up the Waianae coast is another. And another and another.

Yet Agee insists not simply on beauty in poverty, but the "lucky situation of joy" that occurs when the perceiver is put in a position to notice the actual world. Somewhere between the actual (even the non-toilet, the non-art, the car's exhaust) and the writer's perception of it there's a spark. "[I]n any rare situation which breaks down or lowers our habitual impatience, superficial vitality, overeagerness to clinch conclusion, and laziness," offers the writer that joy. Beauty in poverty is greater than beauty in art because actual conditions are real, and art is not. Agee throws imagination out with the (infrequent) bath water and offers as clear a poetics of documentary writing as I've seen anywhere:

I will be trying here to write [this is on page 213!] of nothing whatever which did not in physical actuality or in the mind happen or appear; and my most serious effort will be, not to use these 'materials' for art, far less for journalism, but to give them as they were and as in my memory and regard they are. If there is anything of value and interest in this work it will have to hang entirely on that fact. . . I am in this piece of work illimitably more interested in life than in art (213-214).

"I hate art" becomes "I love actuality."

Actuality can bite back. There are big problems with Agee's project, problems Jonathan Morse gets at on his blog, The Art Part:

In 1980, Howell Raines of the New York Times revisited the three poor Alabama families of whose lives James Agee and Walker Evans made immortal art forty years earlier in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Those forty years, it turned out, had reduced Agee's gusty prose to sentimental fiction. The pathetic little girl whose imminent death Agee movingly predicted, for example, was still alive in 1980 -- and a high school graduate, and six feet tall, and full of hatred for the artists who had once, long ago, picked up her tiny body, made it into a specimen, and then dropped it back into the dirt of Hale County, Alabama, and driven away.

Agee's multi-genre work did include "sentimental fiction," at least in retrospect. That is not its strength. What is strong, it seems to me as I read it now, is the density of detail--as if Agee were as much a shopkeeper as a writer, or maybe just a belated Melville--and in his self-examinations in the face of the task. He finds "the dignity of actuality" in tenant farmers and their few possessions, and posits beauty and sacredness in that actuality. The ad copy provides tenant farmers with small spots of beauty over their fireplace; in Agee's book it is not those pictures but the list of them that is beautiful. The fact of their being there is what makes them beautiful, and the desire for beauty behind them. As Elizabeth Bishop noted of the filling station, itself a beautiful, troubling poem, there is a (feminine) presence behind the doily in the oily shop. She's as interested in that presence as in the doily.

It's where invisibility meets the visible, the hidden hand meets the open eye, that Bishop (and Agee) find the spirit. It's precarious and troubling, but the unsettled (con)fusions are what finally join inventory to art. Book and photographs have shifted from the category of documentation to that of art (the Frank photographs sold at steep prices, according to Jonathan Morse, and netted nothing for their subjects). Or maybe it's in their wavering between art and actuality that the real force of our projects needs to reside. As Agee argues, description is not enough and yet what else is there? The what else is something we bring to the language, some notion of the sacredness of the actual, even if--especially--it is poor in substance or mercantile value.

__________

The other day, the New York Times put up a video clip from a forthcoming Errol Morris film. We see and hear a man (aptly monikered Tink) who has been obsessed with the JFK assassination for many decades, but who is not a conspiracy theorist. He tells us the story of "the umbrella man" who stood next to Kennedy's motorcade at the moment he was shot. He tells us about the conspiracy theories that emerged from his being there, the only man in Dallas who carried an umbrella on that sunny day. And then he tells us that the man was found, years later, and testified before Congress. His umbrella had not had to do with weather, or even with the sun, but with his anger at JFK's father for supporting Neville Chamberlain, who carried an umbrella and who made nice with Adolph Hitler. Nothing is so wacky as ordinary fact, this man tells us on the film clip. Any event, if you look at it closely enough, becomes strange, opens up to our quests for meaning, our tortured intelligences. The man named Tink told this story with something like joy inscribed on his face. Ordinary explanations are way more strange than extraordinary ones, he told us.

Here's a book list for this Spring. Insufficient, I know! And here's a blog post I wrote on teaching documentary poetry.

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Agee & Walker, Mariner Books

Dictee, by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, University of California Press
Don't Let Me Be Lonely, Claudia Rankine, Graywolf Press
Coal Mountain Elementary, Mark Nowak, Coffee House Press
I, Afterlife: Essay in Mourning, Kristin Prevallet, Essay Press
from unincorporated territory [saina], Craig Santos Perez, Omnidawn
Things Come On: an amneoir, Joseph Harrington, Wesleyan
Green-Wood, Allison Cobb, Factory School
We will also read Murial Ruykeyser's Book of the Dead (1938) in pdf or xerox form. I will also recommend a slew of other texts for anyone who is interested.
After asking for suggestions toward a list of readings in documentary prose on facebook, I got the following recommendations:

Ryszard Kapuscinski, Shah of Shahs or The Soccer War & Studs Terkel

W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn & Gary Young, No Other Life
Grand Avenue (a novel in stories), by Greg Sarris, Life Lived Like a Story (Life Stories of Three Yukon Native Elders), by Julie Cruickshank, and Immigrants in Our Own Land, Martín & Meditations on the South Valley, two books of poetry by Jimmy Santiago Baca.
Janisse Ray, Ecology of a Cracker Childhood
Books by Juan Goytisolo
I welcome more suggestions. In the meantime, thanks to Ragnar, Molly, Sergio, and Pam for these possibilities.
Sergio Pereira sent the following list of documentary poetry and prose. What a treasure trove!

Dear Susan,

Here is a 'river-list' of books that I read over the years and perhaps some/most of them

can fit into the category of documentary poetry & documentary prose that you are working

with great talent and dedication.

Best regards,

Sergio

-------------------<>--------------------

Documentary poetry:

Clark Coolidge, The Act of Providence, Combo Books

Roy K. Kiyooka, Pacific Windows - Collected Poems of Roy K. Kiyooka, Talonbooks

Mitsuye Yamada, Camp Notes and Other Writings, Rutgers University Press

Jessica Hagedorn, Danger and Beauty, City Lights Books

Daphne Marlatt, The Given, McClelland & Stewart // Ghost Works (prose & poetry), NeWest

Carter Revard, Winning the Dust Bowl (prose & poetry), The University of Arizona Press

Gu Cheng, Sea of Dreams - The Selected Writings of Gu Cheng, New Directions Books

Breyten Breytenbach, Judas Eye, Faber and Faber

Harry Robinson, Living by Stories - A Journey of Landscape and Memory, Talonbooks

Harry Robinson, Native Power - In the Spirit of an Okanagan Storyteller, Douglas & McIntyre

Ko Un, Ten Thousand Lives, Green Integer

Miyazawa Kenji, Selections, University of California Press

Miguel Algarín, Love is Hard Work - Memorias de Loisaida, Simon & Schuster

Juan Felipe Herrera, Notebooks of a Chile Verde Smuggler (prose & poems), The University of Arizona Press

Louise Bernice Halfe, Bear Bones & Feathers, Coteau Books // Blue Marrow, Coteau Books // The Crooked Good, Coteau Books

Joseph Bruchac, Ndakinna (Our Land) - New and Selected Poems, West End Press

Baisao, The Old Tea Seller - Life and Zen Poetry in 18th Kyoto

Kimberly Blaeser, Apprenticed to Justice, Salt Publishing

Duane Niatum, The Crooked Beak of Love, West End Press

Ricardo Sánchez, Canto y Grito Mi Liberación - The Liberation of a Chicano Mind Soul, Washington State University Press

Eric Gansworth, A Half-Life of Cardio-Pulmonary Function - poems and paintings, Syracuse University Press

Wendy Rose, Itch Like Crazy, The University of Arizona Press

Gregory Scofield, Native Canadiana - songs from the urban rez, Polestar Book Publishers // Singing Home the Bones,

Polestar Publishers

Nora Marks Dauenhauer, Life Woven with Song, The University of Arizona Press

James Thomas Stevens, Combing Snakes from His Hair, Michigan State University Press

Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera - The New Mestiza (prose & poems), Aunt Lute Book Company

Luci Tapahonso, Sáanii Dahataal - The Women Are Singing (poems & stories), The University of Arizona Press

Luci Tapahonso, Blue Horses Rush In - Poems and Stories, The University of Arizona Press

T'ao Ch'ien, The Selected Poems of T'ao Ch'ien, Copper Canyon Press

Su Tung-p'o, Selected Poems of Su Tung-p'o, Copper Canyon Press

Wei Ying-wu, In Such Hard Times - The Poetry of Wei Ying-wu, Copper Canyon Press

Cherríe L. Moraga, Loving In The War Years (prose & poetry), South End Press // The Last Generation - Prose & Poetry,

South End Press

Kamau Brathwaite, DS (2) - dreamstories // Elegguas, Wesleyan University Press

Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Dark and Perfect Angels, Cinco Puntos Press

Maurice Kenny, On Second Thought - A Compilation (prose & poetry), University of Oklahoma Press

Matsuo Basho, Basho's Haiku - The Selected Poems of Matsuo Basho, State University of New York Press

Kobayashi Issa, The Spring of My Life and Selected Poems (prose & haiku), Shambhala Publications

Santoka Taneda, Mountain Tasting - Haiku and Journals of Taneda Santoka, White Pine Press

Ana Castillo, My Father Was a Toltec and Selected Poems, W. W. Norton

Simon J. Ortiz, After and Before the Lightning, The University of Arizona Press // Out There Somewhere, The Univ. of Arizona Press

Documentary prose (memoirs, essays, autobiography)

Leslie Scalapino, R-hu, Atelos // Zyther & Autobiography, Wesleyan University Press

Ted Greenwald, Clearview/LIE, United Artists Books

David Antin, i never knew what time it was, University of California Press

Ron Silliman, Under Albany, Salt Publishing,

Cherríe L. Moraga, A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness - Writings, 2000-2010, Duke University Press

Fanny Howe, The Winter Sun - Notes on a Vocation, Graywolf Press

Lyn Hejinian, My Life, Green Integer

Bernadette Mayer, Studying Hunger Journals, Station Hill Press

Michael Gottlieb, Memoir and Essay, Faux Press

Leslie Marmon Silko, The Turquoise Ledge - A Memoir, Viking Penguin

Etel Adnan, In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country, City Lights Books

Aaron Shurin, King Of Shadows, City Lights Books

Kamau Brathwaite, The Zea Mexican Diary, The University of Wisconsin Press

Jalal Toufic, Over-Sensitivity, Sun & Moon Press

Keith Waldrop, Light While There is Light - An American History, Sun & Moon Books

Fred Wah, Diamond Grill, NeWest

J. M. Synge, The Aran Islands, Oxford University Press

Carolyn Lei-lanilau, Ono Ono Girl's Hula, The University of Wisconsin Press

bell hooks and Amalia Mesa-Bains, Homegrown - engaged cultural criticism, South End Press

bell hooks, Remembered Rapture - The Writer at Work, The Women's Press

Breyten Breytenbach, Mouroir, Archipelago Books // Intimate Stranger - A Writing Book, Archipelago Books // Dog Heart - A Memoir, Faber and Faber

Breyten Breytenbach, The Memory of Birds in Times of Revolution, Return to Paradise, The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist, Faber and Faber

Gerald Vizenor, Interior Landscapes - Autobiographical Myths and Metaphors, University of Minnesota Press

Louis Owens, I hear the Train - Reflections, Inventions, Refractions, University of Oklahoma Press

Bill Reid, Solitary Raven - Selected Writings of Bill Reid

N. Scott Momaday, The Names - A Memoir, The University of Arizona Press // The Way To Rainy Mountain, University of New Mexico Press

N. Scott Momaday, The Man Made of Words - Essays, Stories, Passages, St. Martin's Griffin

Diane Glancy, Claiming Breath, University of Nebraska Press // The Cold-and-Hunger Dance, University of Nebraska Press

Diane Glancy, The West Pole, University of Minnesota Press // In-Between Places, The University of Arizona Press

Alurista, as our barrio turns...who the yoke b on?, Calaca Press

Juan Felipe Herrera, Mayan Drifter - Chicano Poet in the Lowlands of America, Temple University Press

Alfred Arteaga, House with the Blue Bed, Mercury House

Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street, Vintage Books

Kenneth Lincoln, The Good Red Road - Passages Into Native America, University of Nebraska Press

W. S. Penn, All My Sins Are Relatives, University of Nebraska Press // This is the World, Michigan State University Press

Ray A. Young Bear, Black Eagle Child - The Facepaint Narratives, University of Iowa Press

Ray A. Young Bear, Remnants Of The First Earth, Grove Press

Carter Revard, Family Matters,Tribal Affairs, The University of Arizona Press

Linda Hogan, The Woman Who Watches Over The World - A Native Memoir, W. W. Norton

Joseph Bruchac, Bowman's Store - A Journey To Myself, Lee & Low Books

Anita Endrezze, Throwing Fire at the Sun,Water at the Moon (prose & poetry), The University of Arizona Press

Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer - A Story of Survival, University of Nebraska Press

Melissa Jayne Fawcett, Medicine Trail - The Life and Lessons of Gladys Tantaquidgeon, The University of Arizona Press

Darryl Babe Wilson, The Morning The Sun Went Down, Heyday Books

Mavis McCovey and John F. Salter, Medicine Trails - A Life in Many Worlds, Heyday Books

Eva Tulene Watt and Keith H. Basso, Don't let the Sun Step Over You - A White Mountain Apache Family Life, 1860-1975, The University of Arizona Press

Wilma Mankiller and Michael Wallis, Mankiller - A Chief and Her People, St. Martin's Griffin

Jeannette Armstrong, Slash, Theytus Books

Refugio Savala, Autobiography of a Yaqui Poet, The University of Arizona Press

Matsuo Basho, Basho's Journey- The Literary Prose of Matsuo Basho (prose & haibun), State University of New York Press

Jimmy Santiago Baca, A Place to Stand, Grove Press

Greg Sarris, Mabel McKay: Weaving The Dream, University of California Press

From Washington, DC, Dave Taylor sends another list of possibles:


Blood Dazzler, Patricia Smith
The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, Anne Fadiman
Telling True Stories, eds. Kramer & Call
The Conversations, Michael Ondaatje with Walter Murch
which leads into film:
Buddha’s Lost Children, Mark Verkerk
In the Realms of the Unreal, Jessica Yu
Mysterious Object at Noon, Apichatpong Weerasethakul
The Source, Chuck Workman

Back to prose and graphic novel memoirs with:
Away from the Light of Day, Amadou and Mariam
Studs Terkel’s Working: A Graphic Adaptation, Harvey Pekar
Citizen 13660, Miné Okubo
Fun Home, Alison Bechdel

Ceci n'est pas un blog; or, Notes Toward a Definition of Blog Lit

Recently, I found a couple of reviews of my book Dementia Blog on social reading sites. Negative ones. The temptation is to answer them, I suppose, but I don't want to do that here. The book, which began its life as a blog and maintains the form (moving backwards from the present into history) works well for some people, not at all for others, and that's how it will be. But I do want to consider a common thread in critiques of the book, which involves assumptions about the blog as a form. What these assumptions are is what interests me here, as they are not elaborated by the writers of these critiques.

Reviewer one liked the concept, but added, "like all blogs, it was too blousey and boring. There's no there there."

Reviewer two wrote, "This is a worthy subject, but seems too blog-like to work as a book."

[italics are mine]

Clearly, these writers know what they mean when they write the word "blog" (according to Wikipedia, "blog" comes from "weblog," by way of "we blog," a term coined by one Peter Merholz in April or May 1999), but they're not defining their term. Political bloggers are often angered by the the dismissive use of the word "blogger" by members of the mainstream media, those journalists who follow leads dug up by bloggers, but then use the word "blog" to mean something akin to "opinionated speech based on nothing in particular." Bias against blogs as sites for objective reporting originates with the blog form's origins as personal, subjective writing. "The modern blog evolved from the online diary, where people would keep a running account of their personal lives" (Wikipedia).

Joseph Harrington, a fellow blogger, wrote to me a month or two back to ask for examples of "blog lit"; one of his MFA students wanted to start a blog as her project. She has since done so. Joe, like Mark Scroggins, occasionally remarks on a boundary between his blogging and his "real work," however obliquely. I'd be eager to know more about their distinctions, which may be institutional ("we do not get promoted for blogging") or personal ("my blog is more diaristic, less rigorous, than is my other work"). There are certainly dozens of poetry bloggers, though most reserve their blog space for critical considerations of poetry, rather than for poetry itself. Ron Silliman's blog is the ur-example. Poet's blogs are also used to publicize work, the poet's own and that of others, and to stage spirited dialogues via the comment function, about rifts in the poetry world (mainstream vs. experimental, white vs. non-white, flarf vs. conceptual). But this is not what Joe would call "blog lit." Linh Dinh posts photographs on his blog; Jonathan Morse writes about photographs on his. But again, not what we'd call "lit." And, before we evacuate that term, let's investigate a bit more.

So what is blog lit? In order to get to the answer, we need to think about what a blog makes possible. Rather than defining blogs by what people have done with them (written diaries, outed racist politicians), why not think of them as a kind of genre? Just as "the novel" or "non-fiction" or "book" contain multiple generic possibilities, so does the blog. It's simply a container for writing, but a container that is limited and enabled by its rules and those of the software that helps the non-computer literate to create one. Let's enumerate some of these rules:

1. It Must Go Backwards

Or, less simply, it must go forwards within a container that moves backwards. The blog's reader will begin with the present and move into the past. The future is what will appear above the text that's now in place. (Let's call this the "future is up" rule.) This temporal construction is not "natural" to us, but creates possibilities, both literal and metaphorical, that "chronological order" or "flashbacks" do not.

2. It Must Fit Inside a Box

I use blogger.com, which provides me with a narrow box (half the distance across my computer monitor) in which to compose, or dump, my writing. Blogger does not do formatting well, so paragraphs are what work best. The paragraphs work best as boxes, since reading on a computer monitor is easier if there is more white space, not simply indentations at the start of each paragraph. You must think inside the box.

3. It Must Encourage Spontaneity

There are blogs that read as finished products, yes, but most blogs retain the feature of "flow," of "surprise." This is where I think the anti-bloggers feel least comfortable. Blogs are in the tradition of Williams's Kora in Hell, not in that of William Butler Yeats's "Sailing Toward Byzantium." Process is paramount, even if the blog is highly edited, redacted, futzed with. The blogger arrives at thoughts, rather than starting from them. And the finished product is still anti-chronological. Old forms of organization don't work as well. The new ones can be confusing.

4. It May Include Anything

Bakhtin didn't have anything on the blog. While intricately formatted poems don't work on blogger, what does is a sense of wild play, in which the writer may run through Bernadette Mayer exercises until she's giddy. Forms don't work mathematically on blogger, but they do work conceptually. Hence, the blogger can write an ode (in prose), epigrams, elegies (in prose), emails, lists, documents, insults (see Ron Padgett). The form of the form is gone, but the import of the form remains.

5. It Must/Will Be Read Quickly

Here's one I don't much like, but seems inevitable, considering the ease with which the reader can hit a link and hightail it away from your site. (Links are important to blogging.) Reading on-line is not the same as reading on the page (even after the on-line material is printed out). This is not to say that the writer cannot write interesting thoughts, but Montaigne's essays are a better example of what is possible than is continental philosophy. You need to try to get your reader to think, as well as to click.

6. It Must Invite Responses

The comment box (another box) can be a significant part of the blog. As most poetry blogs are critical in content, the comment box offers a place for argument, sometimes in ad hominem fashion. But blog lit holds out the promise of collaborative writing, not simply with one's friends, but with the occasional stranger who approaches the blog post as a launching pad to his or her own writing. Cindy Franklin writes about this in her new book, using Michael Berube's blog and memoir as an example.

7. It Must Confuse Public and Private Spaces

The memory I write onto my blog is no longer private; it has jumped the box. Although there are obvious analogues to any published writing, the blog-memory cannot be closed off in the way the memories in a book can be closed, between covers. It enters an archive or concordance, call it google, that recirculates the memory in ways never imagined by the author, and to readers in places unimagined. The ways in which my memory "rhymes" with those of others becomes a space that needs to be thought about more. Many such rhymes are made by machines (WordPress often suggests posts on similar themes). Again, collaboration comes to mind, perhaps even the construction of new memories in the chaotic legislative chamber we call the internet.

These are not my "Notes Toward a Supreme Blog," because

8. There Can Be No Supreme Blog.