"Where Have All the Bloggers Gone

Gone to Facebook every one / When will they ever learn / When will they ever learn"

it's true, facebook killed the blogger star. i started blogging in the last semester of my MFA at the uni of san francisco because the prof for American Poetry & Poetics, Rob Halpern, had us comment & post on a class blog and i just fell in love with the format & started my own blog here. the next semester, i studied International Poetry & Poetics with Paul Hoover and used the blog to publish my notes on what we were reading. after graduating in 06, i grew post-MFA lonely, so i decided i would try to annotate HD's Trilogy on my blog (one of my favorite pieces from this time is here), read other poets' blogs, and comment whenever i had a chance. at that time, blogworld seemed quite exciting--others who had been blogging for years seemed to have built a certain momentum. little did i know that i entered the scene at its denoument...so many interesting bloggers from the early-mid oughts no longer blog.

reb livingston has an interesting take on the whole phenomenon:

I used to say that FB [Facebook] is for people who want an internet presence, but aren't interesting enough to blog. I still kind of believe that. I no longer think FB is JUST for uninteresting people. I can count at least 10 interesting people on FB. [...] This all changes the blogging atmosphere from what it was a few years ago. Fewer comments are left here. Statcounters are pretty useless. There's a lot less of those dull, promotional-heavy, publication-listing type blogs. That's a big plus in my book. FB and Twitter are much better for that. Of course now I'm dealing with the steady deluge of writers inviting me to become and join their fan pages.

one of my fave bloggers of the past, Jessica Smith, blogged about Facebook on her blog as a "Too Long Facebook status" (she's so meta):

Jessica Smith feels pangs of guilt for being on FB instead of reading a good book and thus contributing to a post-literate society.  But FB does require literacy– it’s like reading a constantly updated, never-ending book that you can’t reread & that changes based on who/how many write it. & though simultaneity and succession bond all reading at a basic level, FB’s constant stream and dependence on memory (since rereading is limited) makes it more of a successive art like music.

i love this. lower limit blogging / upper limit facebook.

Ron Silliman, in this recent article on the Poetry Foundation writes: "Poets blogging is just a symptom."

Well, then I have whatever disease Ron is talking about. My name is Craig Santos Perez & I'm a blogaholic. And instead of helping me fight my addiction, the Poetry Foundation is enabling my sickness. Will real change ever arrive?

in a blogpost dated 2/23/09, Johannes goransson writes:

The real change brought by the Internet is precisely in the new social formations brought on by these e-chapbooks and e-zines etc [...] The proliferation of these sites and communities has totally altered literature so that the Poetry Foundation can only pretend that there is a unified "forefront" (the very concept is an antithetical).

talk about 'valorizing communities' johannes! anyhoo, take that Poetry Foundation! stop pretending!

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