Opening the Window to Get Some Fresh Air

I'm very gratified by the strong response my recent posts, especially "AWP, Communazis, and Me" and "Who You Callin' 'Post-Avant'," have received. It's wonderful to know that people are reading and that they care enough to comment.
However, I have been disturbed by the tenor of many (by no means all) of the responses, which have been hostile and sometimes vitriolic, even descending to the level of personal attack, either direct or implied, including all kinds of baseless negative assumptions about me (including insinuations that I am some kind of conservative or even reactionary). Many of them have also engaged in what felt to me like willful misreadings of what I had actually written.
I shouldn't have been surprised that my post on AWP and its discontents should have received some rather negative responses, since in that post I criticized Charles Bernstein's hyperbolic parody of AWP as Nazi, Stalinist, and MCarthyite. I would remind everyone, though, that criticism is not attack. But I was shocked that my post on post-avant poetry received so many such responses, as I considered it an innocuous description of a phenomenon that is much mentioned but not much defined.
More below the virtual fold.

I am a great believer in debate, disagreement, and argument, but I also strongly believe that they should remain on the level of ideas and reason, and not descend into bickering and ad hominem attacks.
I try to be civil and reasonable even in disagreement, and I think that for the most part I succeed. But I have been offended, angered, and hurt by some of the comments these posts have received. I am only human, and at times have engaged some commenters on a level that I don't feel happy with, though I haven't engaged in the kind of vitriol that some commenters have. I would rather operate on a higher level than that.
I want to put all that behind me, behind us, and start out fresh with the assumption that, no matter how much we may disagree (and we do), we do so on a reasoned, civil basis, and maintain respect for one another. That doesn't mean that we all have to stand around holding hands singing "Kumbaya." It just means that we should take one another seriously, assume one another's good faith, and argue in terms of ideas and what's actually said rather than personalities and assumptions.
During my two expeditions to the AWP conference, last year and this year, I was struck by the fact that every one of the literally hundreds of people I met and talked with was nice. And I'm sure that even many of the more vehement commenters on my posts are nice people in their daily lives. But sometimes the virtuality of the online world makes us forget that we are human beings dealing with other human beings, who have both minds and feelings. Sometimes we write things that we would never say in the real world. But the things we write online have the same kinds of consequences that the things we say in our daily lives have, with the addition that they linger on, potentially poisoning the air for much too long.
So let's start again, on a better and more carefully placed foot.
Next up, my favorite Britney Spears remixes. I'm completely serious.