by Emily Van Duyne
I’ll begin by stating a simple fact: I don’t hate Matthew Dickman’s much-lauded debut collection, All-American Poem (Copper Canyon Press, 2008) nearly as much as Michael Schiavo does.
I also did not enjoy it nearly as much as one Matthew Lippman did.
While I do think it’s possible that, given the chance, Schiavo might be overcome with rage and stab Matthew Dickman, I am mostly positive that Lippman has, by this point, broken into Dickman’s home, where the former is currently starving the latter in the basement, waiting to stitch a skin suit out of his ruddy complexion, weave a pelt out of his hipster hair, and scrawl cooing, loving messages on Dorianne Laux and Marie Howe’s Facebook pages, whilst shimmying along to the sweet sounds of Q Lazzarus.
This is not to say I like the book. I hate it. I should mention I was predisposed to hating it by the blurb at the top of the back cover, composed by Marie Howe and bursting with cherry fruit flavor. (No shit, folks, it’s printed in bright red while the rest are printed in black and blue). My best friend, a poet, had read some of Dickman’s work in American Poetry Review and liked it so much she called me one night, hammered, to read to me from his poem, “Roma.” She was particularly bowled over by his lines about a slice of pineapple from a pizza the poem’s speaker is sharing with his pal; Dickman compared the pineapple on the dude’s tongue to a communion wafer. “Isn’t that FUCKING GREAT???” she bellowed into the phone, then said, “MMM!! mmm.”
I was not bowled over by Dole as sacrament, but I was living in San Francisco at the time and acting as the patron saint of East Coast drinkers who often need a kind ear post-midnight, EST. “Sure,” I nodded, “it’s something.” About a year later, she called me at work when his book arrived on her front porch. “Is it everything you thought it would be?” I asked. “I don’t know,” she said, “I can’t get past the blurb from Marie Howe.”
I can’t quote the blurb — so I’ll just say this — it proves Matthew Dickman is a powerful, powerful little wizard of a man. He may very well be a sorcerer. In fact, I am willing to bet that he stole Roberto Bolano’s dark magic and is employing it to turn some of the best poets of the last 20 years into drooling idiots.
The trouble with Dickman’s poetry is it appropriates experience rather than taking experience and re-envisioning it, strips the authenticity from day-to-day living until, by the end of the book, it feels as if America is composed entirely of honky-tonk bars and strip malls — and he couldn’t be happier about it. If you doubt me, see his poem “Black,” in which he claims to “feel” the “super-malls” (what the hell’s a super-mall, anyway?) “acutely.” The poems as a whole are akin to someone walking around and deciding to write a poem about every single thing they do that day — for instance, my friend and I just went for pizza, and I said, “If I was Matthew Dickman, I’d write a poem about this called, “Pizza Poem,” and it would be filled with red checkered tablecloths and Chianti bottles with candles.” The point being, of course, neither of those things existed at the restaurant we were at — but Dickman’s book is a fantasia of the mundane.
And apparently, this is all we’re asking of poems these days — and Marie Howe has joined in on the fun! Not in her own poems (thank God), but in her blurb for Dickman’s book, which imagines the manuscript as the echo of Frank O’Hara and Fred Astaire’s late spring afternoon waltz across (wait for it!) our lives. Or, rather, our lives’ shattered landscape. All the blurbs (the other two come from no less than Major Jackson and Dorianne Laux) read like this — as if the poets writing blurbs ran a pop culture search on Google and then added a lot of superlatives; in short, they cease to actually be about the book and instead become a fun little game wherein the blurber tries to out-Dickman Dickman, but ends up just writing the equivalent of the words, “I am totally awesome.” Which reminds me that, in the unlikely event that I ever get a collection published, I am just going to skip the happy hoo-ha and have my friends write, “I am totally awesome,” with their names underneath, on the back cover.
The problem I have with this, ultimately, is that all these nonsensical, dribbling accolades turn off the spigot on conversation about the actual poetry in Dickman’s book, which while I do not like it, is certainly more interesting and thought-provoking than the blurb-al masturbation on the back cover leads one to believe; I mean, honestly, could Frank O’Hara even dance? And what in God’s name does that statement have to do with the book it’s supposed to be selling?
The point is, though, the book does sell, and will continue to — and you should buy it, for sure, and judge for yourself. Who wouldn’t want to know what two dead guys dancing sounds like? While you’re at it, you might check out another book that came out around the same time, one that received one-third of the attention and one-tenth of the reviews — Sister, by Nickole Brown (Red Hen Press, 2007). This collection is a remarkable trip through hell via suburban Kentucky in the ’70s and ’80s.
That might have seemed like a hasty transition from Dickman’s collection, but I mention it for a number of reasons, not the least of which is this — most of the reviews I found for Dickman’s book applaud it repeatedly for the strength of its poetry, which is then almost never discussed or critiqued in any detail. Instead, most of the reviewers choose to immediately compare it to any number of the following poets/works — Whitman, Ginsberg, Koch, Hughes, Neruda and Pink Floyd’s The Wall. There’s a lot of talk about how it makes the reviewer “feel” on the “inside”: “light,” “airy,” “fulfilled,” “large-hearted,” “bursting” — I searched and searched for “sexist,” (there’s a lot of “light-hearted” talk about the long list of chicks Dickman banged in his poems) but no dice.
While combing through reviews of Sister, however, a book that deals dicily — with no pat turns but plenty of haunting trickery — with incest, I found boatloads of happy discussions — again, not about the poems but about Nickole Brown’s personal psychology and inability to “heal her wounds.” One charming reviewer, who claims to have enjoyed the book, gives us “a quick visit to the learning theories of Jean Piaget, specifically the ideas of ‘epistemic conflict,’” before going on to discuss in detail the ways Brown is “dealing” with her past by writing some real nice little poems, a few of which he mentions, none of which are discussed in terms of writing, all of which are related back to Brown’s personal history.
It’s as though Nickole Brown begins her book by saying, “Hi, I’m Nickole and I’m gonna tell you a real bummer of a tale,” instead of the actual first poem of the book, one about sisters in utero filled with sheet tents and piss, flashlights and cauls. Her book is a perfect antidote to Dickman’s hollow bravado.
In closing, a shameless plug — I’d like to share my writing partner W.F. Roby’s take on Matthew Dickman’s book. Will wrote his own “All-State Poem,” which can be found here at our blog, Teacup.
And like I said, buy those books. See you next time.
 Emily Van Duyne is a poet who lives just south of Atlantic City, N.J., where she is adjunct professor of writing at Atlantic Cape Community College. Her poems can be viewed at I Was Born Doing Reference Work in Sin.
by W. F. Roby
Welcome to The B-Sides — the gritty side of the album. Think of the Beatles’ track “The Inner Light” as opposed to “Lady Madonna.” Sure, “Madonna” has a great beat and you can dance to it, but “Inner Light” is a little piece of psychedelic perfection. Pop music told through a thin veil of McEastern Philosophy. Listen to it — sounds like Gershwin after a couple of listens. Or a couple of beers.
Just like “The Inner Light” was a B-Side track that far outclassed the A-Side, so the poems and journals I feature here turned me on more than anything I read in the larger press venues for a given month or two. Not very scientific — hey, you can’t force genius. After I show you a poem and talk about it, I’m gonna share some questions about the poet’s favorite music. See what I did there? “B-sides” … questions about music. It’s a theme.
Anyway, I hope to ask questions that people want to hear, so I’ve started out very generic at this point. Let me know what questions you want me to ask the poets, and I’ll pick a few, and the whole “interview” process will become interactive — which people tell me is a good thing on the Internet. So I’ve got that covered.
Curtis L. Crisler’s poem “They Will Say” is featured in the fifth issue of Anti-, an online journal that goes out of the way to call itself “contrarian” and “a devil’s advocate.” Don’t confuse Anti- with Nicanor Perra’s school of poetry called antipoetry — though the URL might lead you to believe otherwise — the editors at Anti- appreciate Perra’s work but serve their own master. Steven Schroeder, the editor, wants to fight against the confinement of poetry “in too-small boxes,” hoping instead to publish poetry of all types and across all genre lines.
Crisler’s poem is dedicated to Jam Master Jay, best known as the DJ for hip hop act Run DMC. Crisler is playfully blurring the lines between freestyle rap and formal poetry, and a highlight of the poem for me is an early section where the poet steps in to editorialize:
… [The rule
of code switchin’ is to code switch: you must
trust true prophets spreadin’ good news]. Some will
say it disrupts mind to small silent hush,
and this disease can’t be saved with a pill.
The poem itself reads like a freestyle rap between friends — note that the last word of each individual strophe is the word that the next verse begins with. Reading through Crisler’s poem the first time, I felt a familiar sense of excitement. When I was in high school, I participated in plenty of “battles” between those of us who considered ourselves “street poets” — this poetry is kind of like rap with brains but very little in the way of maturity. It is typical hip-hop dressed up in fancy “vocab” and balanced out by plenty of cruelty and outright perversion.
Lots of you are familiar with the idea of a “battle” from television and films — think Eminem in 8 Mile or whatever the hell that was Saul Williams did in Slam — and I know opinion on this type of wordplay is divided in the world of contemporary poetry. That is to say most of the people reading this think there’s no value to hip-hop in terms of the more “literary arts” … you know, like the heroic epic you wrote in dactyllic hexameter when you were an undergraduate … smart people stuff.
We could argue all day if so called “slam poetry” or “performance poetry” is on par with our Great Bearded White Man canon, but there’s no doubt that what Crisler has created is good poetry.
I love how he uses the brackets in the above selection. I came into this poem as a casual reader and, after some of the images stuck with me, I went back to it with a more critical eye. Only on my third reading did I notice the effect those simple little brackets have. If I approach the poem as a recorded bit of street poetry, I have to assume that the poet is indicating some sort of stage direction here. The poem comes alive for me — I envision the poet stopping to break this idea down at a different tempo, slower and with a little less emphasis, a bit of speech to break up the rhythm.
If I don’t approach the poem this way — as some sort of freestyle rap in the blankest of verses — then I’m forced to read the bracketed section as one man’s editorial on a scene-wide meme. This is how this poet feels about the concept of code switching as it plays itself out in the clubs and bars, in private MC battles and yes even on the boards of a slam poetry stage. I come away from Crisler’s poem excited to be a part of his world, to take part in the heady pseudo elegy he’s decided to share with us.
I love what Crisler does. I’m a fan of all types of rhymes from Shakespeare to Andre 3000 — I don’t discriminate between the spoken word and words written in a book. Feel how you want about hip-hop or slam — Crisler’s poem is successful. Sure, it sounds like three verses of freestyle rap. After all, the tropes are all here. We’ve got name dropping, slang, calls to duty veiled as bare bones emotional appeals, etc. And the poet is clearly in hip-hop’s debt in terms of inspiration.
What makes Crisler’s rap/soliloquy work is that the idea of the poem is solid. The substrate that his wordplay is growing on is good. We’ve got “music as judge” — the Beastie Boys as backslidden MCs and Lauryn Hill described as “singing hopeful from death-boxes of pine,” like something out of Whitman but used to describe a contemporary musician’s state of mind. As if she’s a victim. OK — I could go on.
The larger point to make is that I wouldn’t have read Crisler’s pitch-perfect “They Will Say” if I hadn’t been paying attention to what’s going on at Anti-. Full disclosure — I had two poems published at Anti- a while back, but I’ve been reading this journal since the first issue came out in January of 2008. Psst — that makes them 2 years old now.
Celebrate this big birthday by checking out all five of their issues and even larger number of “featured poets.” The editors at Anti- consistently publish interesting work from names I’ve never heard of — and the poet’s bios are a joy to read, containing short lists of things the poets themselves are “anti.” Many thanks to Anti- and their editorial staff for allowing us to excerpt this poem so soon after it first appeared in their journal.
Here’s a short Q&A I did with Crisler about his favorite music.
W.F. Roby: What are your top three albums of any musical era?
Curtis L. Crisler: Bitches Brew, Miles Davis — Songs in the Key of Life, Stevie Wonder — and One Nation Under a Groove, Parliament/Funkadelics
alternates
The Chronic, Dr. Dre — Jagged Little Pill, Alanis Morisette — Nevermind, Nirvana
This was really too hard to do, but these are all albums that established followers and opened up a new kind of dialogue, and that are still revered. Now, I’m thinking about Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, James Brown, Sugarhill Gang, Brides of Funkenstein, Tina Marie, LaBelle, B.B. King, and it can go on and on. Sorry.
WFR: Is there an album in your collection that you love but would never let your friends see?
CLC: Most people who know me know that I have a weird eclectic taste, so they would cut on me, but would not be surprised. I’m thinking of Streisand, The Shins, Tchaikovsky, or Fred Astaire’s recordings.
WFR: Do you listen to music when you work on poems?
CLC: Not usually. At times it just happens, for example when I am driving down the street and I get an idea, the radio could be on, and it could be anything, but a line will come through, or I’ll see an image and I can’t say if the music did not get me there, so I can’t discount it. But when I have something established, sometimes I have used music just as background and it is usually up to the tone of the piece what it is that I am listening to — like The Beatles, Ray Charles, Angela Bofill, Rene and Angela, The Stylistics or The Isley Brothers.
WFR: What one song do you want everyone in the world to go out and listen to right now?
CLC: “Under the Moon and Over the Sky,” by Angela Bofill
Lyrics to “On Saturday Afternoons in 1963,” by Rickie Lee Jones
Either one would be a great addition to anyone’s library.
 W.F. Roby’s poems have appeared most recently at Umbrella, Stirring, Spilt Milk, Yareah and Anti-. His short plays have been produced across the country. He will soon be seeking his MFA at Simon’s Clown College and Radio Repair.
by Dave Jarecki
Some 8-year-old boys drool. In the 4 years in which I’ve worked with third graders, at least one boy has drooled in the middle of at least one class. Sometimes it’s from frustration, but mostly it’s a result of over-excitement coupled with a blood sugar spike.
This year’s drooler is Ben. He’s now drooled three times in two sessions, which means he has six more sessions to break the all-time drool-per-session record of seven. Ben’s in-class snack of choice is a juice box. His teeth are coming in at jagged angles, leaving plenty of gaps through which saliva can escape. And writing excites the hell out of him.
I say the record is his.
What really excites him about writing is having the chance to write what he wants to write, as opposed to what the teacher “tells him” to write, as he puts it. That’s the beauty of not being a “real teacher,” as I explain to the kids in our first session, and this not being a “class,” but a “workshop.” I’m not here to tell them what they have to write. The best I can do is to guide them along the path of discovering the words inside them.
“Do you mean you don’t care about spelling?”
“Don’t let spelling stop your writing.”
“What about if I put a period in the wrong place?”
“We worry about grammar later.”
“Cool!”
I never wanted to teach with my English degree, but the idea of workshops always appealed to me. In 2004, I went through a spring and summer intensive with Write Around Portland, a nonprofit that provides free writing workshops to under-served populations such as homeless kids, adults living with AIDS, and women in prison. I adopted the organization’s core belief: Everyone is a writer.
A few months later, I started a weekly workshop at a local Volunteers of America halfway house, working primarily with middle-aged men who were trying to stay off the streets and out of prison. Later I worked with teens who were fighting the same thing. Early in 2006, I started working with public school kids — kindergarten through senior high.
I figured working in schools would be easier. In the beginning, it was much more challenging. It didn’t have to do with the students. Mostly it was my own uncertainty around what I should be giving them, what I should be leaving behind, and how best to help them grow as writers.
What I’ve discovered over time is that the thing kids want and value most in a workshop setting is the opportunity to roam on the page. They want the freedom to express themselves in ways that get beyond grammar and punctuation. They want to make a mess with words. And from their messes, they want to fashion stories and poems.
Most elementary- and middle-school kids want to write fantasy. Call it the Potter-ization of the juvenile mind. This particular group of third graders wants to write poetry, which they explained on our first day.
If the best thing I can give them is the space to write, then the best thing they can give me is a guidepost from where to plan. Toward the end of our first session, once the topic turned to poetry, I asked a simple question:
“Does poetry have to rhyme?”
Ben said no. Rosa, a pixy whose sleepy eyes hide behind a wall of blond bangs, disagreed.
“How the heck do you write a poem that doesn’t rhyme?”
I asked the kids how much poetry they’ve read. They didn’t know what I meant.
“Do your teachers bring poetry in for you?”
“No.”
“Why?”
They shrugged.
Rosa repeated her question.
I stood up and rewrote her question on the chalkboard — some classrooms actually still have them.
“The answer’s in the question,” I said. Rosa rolled her eyes. Everyone else scrunched their faces. Ben cocked his head in a quick fit. Rosa blew up at her bangs.
I started erasing words. “How the heck … doesn’t rhyme … do … that.”
The kids read back what was left.
“You write a poem.”
Ben started to shake.
“And we can write what we want!”
Then came the drool.
The next week I brought in a piece about a bubblegum princess. I borrowed the idea from a poem in Peter Sears’ Gonna Bake Me a Rainbow Poem, a fantastic little book on teaching poetry to young writers. My poem was full of slant and internal rhyme, but no obvious end rhymes. When I asked if it rhymed, the resounding answer was, “Sort of.”
From there we moved into a pre-writing exercise. The kids wrote lists of characters, objects and actions. We talked through the lists as a group. Then it was time to write our poems.
The next 15 minutes was a mix of pencils scratching on paper, giggles and bathroom breaks. Ben slurped his juice box. Rosa sat under the table and wrote her poem on the floor.
When it was time to read, Ben wanted to go first. I could see the drool forming behind his teeth:
BLT Boy & Candygum
purchase pink pickpockets
for pork pachyderms of paradise
who are cruel drinking
and please the fleas
who ride ferrets
for freaky fools
fooling with humvees.
Rosa was next. She made a point of saying hers rhymed. She also pointed out that I was her inspiration:
Frankenstein Teacher
The teacher is funny.
When he smiles he looks at bunnies.
He’s thinking of pulling a sleigh.
And that the sky is really gray.
Because he does this every day.
On their way out, I thanked them for being in class. They thanked me back. A number of parents stopped in and thanked me for having the class. That’s the best thing anyone could give me.
 Dave Jarecki writes poetry, prose and strategic communications from his home office in Portland, Ore. Read and listen to his work, as well as the work of guest writers, at DaveJarecki.com.
by Dave Bonta
Is your poetry accessible? No, I’m not talking about whether it can be understood by anyone with an 8th-grade education and the attention span of a gnat. I mean, if you blog poetry — as almost all participants in the weekly Read Write Prompts do — are your poems reaching their intended and potential audiences?
Slow and mobile connections
To answer the question above, you need to know something about the audience: Who is trying to access your blog, and what tools are they using. For example, do you want to reach a lot of rural readers, or readers in the global South? If so, please remember that many if not most of them will be relying on dial-up access or cellphone networks. Be sure to restrict the number of posts that display on your main page — I’d say no more than five.
Alternatively, you could display a larger number of posts in excerpt form with “read more” links. This approach is especially helpful to people on slower connections if your posts typically contain a number of images. You can also post thumbnails or small versions of images that click through to larger files, for those with the patience or bandwidth to access them. And if you post audio or video poems, be sure to include a transcript for the benefit of those on dial-up.
Even if you’re not too concerned about reaching people with slow connections, making sure your site is more accessible to them can benefit visitors on broadband, too. Blogs with too many posts displayed on the front page, for example, can be really challenging to browse. Many if not most web design guidelines for low bandwidth will improve the usability of your site. Blogs and other websites that take longer than 10 seconds to load risk losing first-time readers, especially if the site is so designed that the sidebar loads before the main content. (This can be a problem with older blog designs or those with sidebars on the left.) Quite apart from the visual distraction of a sidebar crammed with widgets, the NASCAR approach to blog ornamentation can also retard load-times, since so many widgets use JavaScript.
Remember that your browser is probably caching — storing recent copies of — your blog, presuming you visit it frequently, so you can’t necessarily tell how fast the site loads unless you clear your cache or view it on other machines and in other browsers. And widgets aren’t the only thing that can slow a site, either. Last winter, I had a problem with my self-hosted WordPress blog loading very slowly. A geek cousin advised me that 35 plugins was probably a bit too many. So I did some pruning, and load times did indeed improve. Ultimately, though, the problem turned out to be the funky shared server I was on, because a switch to a new blog host cleared the problem up. (Self-hosted WordPress bloggers can refer to “8 Ways to Improve Your WordPress’ Loading Time” for some additional ideas.)
Does a large percentage of your audience rely on mobile phones to read your blog? If so, you might want to make sure your main column isn’t too wide, or that you don’t post a lot of poems with long lines that require back-and-forth scrolling. For those with self-hosted WordPress.org blogs, you can use a special theme or plugin that displays a simplified version of your site to anyone viewing it on a mobile device.
Reaching the visually impaired
Mention accessibility to most web geeks, and they’ll think you’re talking mainly about design that takes the needs of the visually impaired into account. As I use the term, it’s much broader than that. But again, making sure your site is accessible to this often-neglected group can benefit many other visitors, too. CAPTCHAS, for example — those deliberately hard-to-read puzzles designed to keep spam bots from leaving comments — are an annoyance to many people, not just the visually impaired, who can’t deal with them at all unless they’re accompanied by audio. If you’re on a blog platform where alternate spam-blocking methods can be used, such as Akismet (which is not just for WordPress), Defensio or Typepad AntiSpam, you don’t really have any good reason to use CAPTCHAS.
Many people with poor vision or color blindness can and do read the web, but if your stylin’ blog theme features small text, or light gray text on a dark background, there’s a good chance they’re not reading you. In general, a blog or website with dark text on a light background will be most easily accessible to the visually impaired (and most restful for everyone else to read, too). If you want to liven up your blog with bright colors, use images. Varying the font colors from post to post will almost certainly provoke eyestrain — and not just in those with poor vision.
If you want visually impaired people to be able to distinguish your links, you really should go with the boring old underline style for link text (and be very cautious about underlining text for any other reason, to avoid confusion). Now, I realize that an underlined word might well be distracting in the middle of a poem, but perhaps in some cases links can be relocated to end notes instead. Personally, I find any form of link in the body of a poem to be distracting, but tastes vary.
Want to annoy or confuse the hell out of your readers, especially those with impaired vision? Use SnapShots popup previews on your links. In WordPress.com, unfortunately, this “feature” is enabled by default, which I think leads many to believe it must be cool. In many other blogging platforms, you can also further torment your readership by using text-link ads, which by mimicking real links threaten the integrity of the very architecture of the web. Talk about a usability nightmare!
Many people, including older folks with otherwise good vision, appreciate being able to resize the text on their screens via the View menu on their browsers, so make sure that this is possible on your site. Some poorly coded sites use pixels rather than percentages and ems to control font size, and as a result don’t allow any adjustment.
We’ve been talking about people with poor vision, but what about those with no vision at all? Blind people use what are called screen readers, software that translates web pages into speech (or sometimes Braille). When blog themes place crucial navigation links after the main content, as so many of them do — in the sidebar or footer rather than in a top navigation bar — screen readers can take a while to locate them. Imagine what a hassle that must be! If you’re going to use a design with category links or other useful things in the footer, consider adopting (or making) one with a “skip to bottom” link at the top.
Screen readers for the blind also rely on semantic markup. This means, for example, coding italics with em tags rather than i tags, and bold text with strong rather than b. Large blocks of quoted material should be enclosed in blockquote tags — but don’t use blockquotes merely to indent, say, a dedication at the beginning of a poem. And it really messes up screen readers if you use header tags such as h2 and h3 when you simply want larger or bolder text. So mess with semantics in your poetry all you want, but be sure to use designs and text editors that are as web semantics-compliant as possible. This will also have the side benefit of making your archives more future-proof. How are you ever going to achieve poetic immortality if semantically correct browsers 10 or 15 years from now won’t even display your poems properly?
Another tip, for those who like to experiment with ekphrastic poetry: The only way blind people will “see” your images is if you get in the habit of supplying descriptive alt (alternative) text. (Spacer images or other nonessential, mainly ornamental illustrations, however, should be given null alt text, i.e., alt=” “, to avoid confusion.) Most image uploader tools will prompt for a description, which may be used for the less-important title attribute as well. This can have the side benefit of dramatically increasing the number of visitors you get from search engines. In general, semantic markup helps get you a better search-engine ranking, since it helps search engines more accurately evaluate your content.
Does your blog make sense?
What does the average visitor see when arriving on your site from another blog or a web search? If they land on some post deep in your archives, will those visitors be tempted to stick around? Will they even be able to find the homepage? A surprising number of bloggers never take this into consideration. Website usability is a huge topic, but for now, I just want to stress the importance of designing your site with that casual visitor in mind. A few points to consider:
- Is there a “home” link near the top of the page? If not, is the title of the blog at least clickable?
- Are links to “next” and “previous” posts present and visible (i.e., not buried below the comments) on single-post pages?
- Can visitors quickly learn what the site is about from an About page and/or a bit of explanatory text near the top?
- Is there a search form? If someone follows a bad link and ends up on a 404 page, will they be able to find what they’re looking for?
- Are there ways for visitors to browse the archives, aside from one of those mysteriously popular and generally useless sidebar lists of months?
- Might tag clouds or category lists be given more descriptive headings, such as “Topics”?
- How about making room in the sidebar or footer for a list of some of your best or most popular posts, so people can see what you’re really capable of?
- If many of your posts are password-protected, do you provide an obvious way for visitors to contact you and get the password (along with some brief explanation for why you have so many private posts, e.g., to avoid violating submissions guidelines at some literary magazines)?
Reaching the downtrodden
It’s a good bet that many of your readers are accessing your blog from work. Is your blog work-safe? Do you have audio widgets set to auto-play in your sidebar? If so, please disable the auto-play function immediately, because, trust me, that’s annoying to almost everybody, not just busy co-workers. If people tell you they like it, they’re probably just being polite.
Much attention has been given to the Great Firewall of China, which results in the blocking of many blogs and blog platforms. (WordPress.com, for example, has been blocked for years due to the parent company’s principled stand against censorship.) But here in the United States, and probably elsewhere in the so-called free world, many, many sites are blocked by corporate firewalls. You may be publishing nothing objectionable but still run afoul of ridiculously broad-brush content-control software, aka censorware. Schools and public libraries also usually use some form of censorware. A study conducted by the Electronic Frontier Foundation in 2003 [link to PDF] found that commercial censorware products block up to half of all web pages relevant to common school curricula in the United States.
I certainly wouldn’t advise you to temper your language or avoid occasional posting of artistic nudes just to get around the net nannies. The onus is really on your readers, in this case, to use proxies and other work-arounds. But it’s something to be aware of. You can see if SmartFilter and other censorware systems owned by McAfee consider your site objectionable at TrustedSource. (Other major censorware companies used to have URL checkers online, but sadly, they’ve all been taken down as far as I can tell.)
Another crucial fact to keep in mind is that many large employers won’t let their workers use newer browsers and are still using Internet Explorer 6, which is so despised by web designers that some new blog themes don’t even make allowances for it. Even MSN and YouTube don’t support IE6 anymore. But IE6 is still the browser for some 14 percent of web surfers. I’m not willing to put out an unwelcome mat for them just because their employers are a-holes, so I do make sure all my sites are IE6-compatible. To check how your blog or webpage appears in a variety of major and minor browsers of different vintages, enter your URL at BrowserShots.org.
Feeding your readers
Another, potentially large, group of readers that beginning bloggers often neglect are those who subscribe to the feed and thereafter mainly access it via a feed reader (e.g., Google Reader, Bloglines, Newsgator). If you are using a modern blogging platform or content-management system, you are generating a feed — which is to say, a version of your content in a special form (usually RSS or Atom) designed for easy syndication elsewhere, such as in feed readers. Using a feed reader is a great way to keep track of when your favorite blogs, news sites and online journals are updated — and to store some posts for later reading.
Some blogs fetishize the RSS feed icon and make it a visual center of the top part of their blog. Personally, I find this a bit distracting, especially since most people web-savvy enough to subscribe to feeds are also going to be using a modern browser that lets you grab feeds right from the address bar. But it’s still a good idea to make feed links easy to find. And a big honking RSS icon is a far sight less fugly than an enormous, blue, vaguely avian creature whose only purpose is to lure people away from your real content and onto to your Twitter stream. Is that what you want?
Although feeds are still regarded as a geeky thing, ironically they have one application that can make your poems and other blog posts much more accessible to those who don’t spend very much time online: email subscriptions. I’ve used both the major free email subscription services, Feedburner and Feedblitz. These days, I prefer the latter. Now owned by Google, Feedburner has been plagued with performance issues over the past year. Of equal concern to poets: It doesn’t display spaces between stanzas and paragraphs, and emails from Feedburner bear only the title of your blog, while emails from Feedblitz also contain the post title by default — and are much more customizable.
If you do offer email subscriptions, be sure to subscribe yourself so you can make sure it’s going out OK. Also, I think it’s a good idea to subscribe to your blog’s feed in a feed reader, even if you don’t plan to use it otherwise. (I recommend Google Reader for ease of use.) What can go wrong with a feed? The most common problem is that a blog may be set to display only excerpts rather than full posts, often through neglect or ignorance. Some bloggers switch from full to partial feeds to try and force readers to visit their site, perhaps so they’ll be more likely to leave a comment or click on an ad. But many of us simply unsubscribe from such feeds.
Even a full-content feed will likely not display some types of content, such as embedded videos and audio players. For this reason, it’s a good idea to include a download link and/or a note that subscribers need to click through to the post to access the video or audio.
Another reason to subscribe to your own feed is to make sure you don’t accidentally duplicate posts, and that deleted posts also disappear from the feed. Post duplication can happen anytime the URL is changed, so it’s a good idea to make sure you keep the same URL when you change the title if you’re using a title-based permalink system. Deleting a post from a feed can be tricky, and erasing it from Google Reader, which aggressively caches feeds, can be even trickier. Sometimes the best you can do is to replace the unwanted content with a notice saying something like “post removed by author,” and then republish. It may take a few hours, but the feed readers should eventually pick up on the change. After that, you can delete the post.
Don’t look at me, I’m just a poet!
If you’re feeling bad that you’ve committed usability and accessibility sins, don’t worry: there’s no perfect solution that will work for all user groups. So feel free to ignore any of the above suggestions that aren’t relevant to your aims as a blogger. I welcome questions and additional suggestions in the comments.
Keep in mind that I’m still a learner myself; I’m not a true geek, and I have no systematic training in any of this. But with all the people joining Read Write Poem now, it’s a good bet that if I can’t answer your question, someone else can.
 Dave Bonta is a poet, editor and web publisher from the eastern edge of western Pennsylvania. He co-edits Qarrtsiluni, curates the video poetry site Moving Poems and has been blogging since 2003 at Via Negativa. He is a senior contributor at Read Write Poem. (photo credit :: (c) 2009 Jonathan Sa’adah)
by Dave Bonta
For me, poetry is first and foremost an oral art. Many of my all-time favorite poems came straight out of the oral tradition – Beowulf, Son-Jara, the Chinese Book of Songs – and I’m continually annoyed by the fact that contemporary MFA programs place so little emphasis on dramatic reading and performance. Why should the poetry slammers have all the fun? Who decided that “serious” American poets should limit their reading style to a monotonous, sing-song chant?
So I was cheered to read, in Deb’s post Li-Young Lee and the dying breath, that at least one major contemporary poet strongly believes in reading poems out loud. “A poem is like a musical score for the human voice,” Lee declares.
Deb’s new-found enthusiasm for sharing audio recordings online reminded me of my own enthusiasm a year ago, when I bought a $30 dictation microphone and began making digital recordings as part of an archive of my poetry that I was building on a WordPress.com site. Key to the enterprise, I thought, was the ability to embed an audio player on a blog page so that people aren’t taken elsewhere while they listen, which is what happens if you simply supply an audio link. (On the other hand, I discovered that failing to include an extra link for downloading meant that the audio didn’t show up in the RSS feed, so nowadays I do both.)
At first, I used Odeo, because that was the audio-blogging format supported at WordPress.com (which, unlike Blogger, doesn’t let users embed javascript directly). I made the recordings using the free Audacity software, which I’m told is roughly equivalent in quality to Mac’s Garageband. Storing the files was a bit of a problem: there are a lot of free file storage sites out there, but they tend to bombard you with ads, place severe restrictions on how much you can upload, and/or eliminate your files if nobody clicks on them at least once a month. Soon, however, WordPress.com introduced its own Flash-based audio player, so I no longer had to route my files through an Odeo shell. And at that point, they also began supporting MP3s and other formats for a fairly nominal annual fee. (For my main, self-hosted blog, which also uses a WordPress platform, I uploaded the 1 Pixel Out audio plugin, which is very similar to what WordPress.com uses. It works great. More sophisticated WordPress.org users might want to give the PodPress plugin a try.)
With embeddable players accompanied by text, people can read along while they listen, or vice versa. To my mind, this is one of the few real advantages that the online medium has over print, and it more than compensates for the difficulty of reading and absorbing text on a screen. At qarrtsiluni, the literary magazine I help curate, we only began encouraging all contributors to make audio recordings a few months ago, because we’d always assumed it would be too difficult for most people to manage. But I hadn’t realized how many laptops have built-in microphones, and how generally resourceful online writers tend to be. (One enterprising poet even went to her local public-access cable TV station and got the engineers there to make a recording for her.) I know some of our visitors never listen to the audio, and that’s fine. But I felt vindicated by a recent review at the popular social bookmarking site, StumbleUpon, praising qarrtsiluni for the inclusion of audio, and adding: “For ADD types such as myself, absorbing literary material both visually and audibly seems to increase the likelihood that some of it will actually stick.”
I don’t want to suggest that we’re trail-blazers here. The Cortland Review has been including audio with virtually all its poems for a number of years, and recently made the transition to Flash-based players. I suspect they’ve invested in a good telephone recording system, like what radio stations use. Over in Great Britain, Poetcasting records many of its featured poets in person, and describes its mission as bridging the divide between performance poets and those who write for the page. Another audio poetry site that syndicates its content is From the Fishouse, which focuses on “emerging poets.” For better-known poets, living and dead, check out PennSound, The Poetry Archive, and the Academy of American Poets.
I’ve compiled a page of basic suggestions for how to make an audio recording with the needs of qarrtsiluni contributors in mind. But if you’re interested in posting audio on your own site, I’m afraid I’m not very well qualified to make recommendations, because I haven’t experimented with very many options, and I don’t know which ones are compatible with which blogging platforms. Audio publishing systems apparently worth considering include: Gcast, ClickCaster, podOmatic, Poderator and Hipcast. (You can see an example of a Hipcast player on this post at Watermark, which is a TypePad blog.)
Keep in mind that these systems were designed for regular podcasting, which takes radio as its model – not the kind of oral-literary hybrid I’m talking about.
If you have experience with these or other systems, or if you have any other suggestions of audio-blogging tools, please leave a comment. I hope to be able to revisit this subject for Read Write Poem a few months from now and present a lot more solid information.
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read write poem news- read write poem napowrimo anthology
June 20, 2010 | 1:36 pmThe Read Write Poem NaPoWriMo Anthology is still in production. Selection, placement, layout and copyediting are taking longer than anticipated. Thank you for your patience. I hope to have the piece completed in July. For those who have emailed asking if they can be included, the May 7 deadline for submission of work stands. Those who met that deadline will be included. Please check the post on this site listing who I received submissions from by that date. If you submitted your work by the May 7 deadline in accordance with our guidelines and your name is not listed, send an email to info (at) readwritepoem (dot) org.
- read write poem napowrimo anthology
May 5, 2010 | 3:09 pmRemember that Friday* is the deadline for submitting work to the Read Write Poem NaPoWriMo Anthology. Check out the guidelines for submission in the main column (to the left). On May 8, we’ll post a news item listing everyone we’ve received work from. If you submitted work and your name is not on that list, please let us know. Thanks!
*I initially said “tomorrow,” but I meant to say “Friday.”
- napowrimo congratulations, and a reminder
April 24, 2010 | 12:05 pmIt’s the final week of the Read Write Poem NaPoWriMo Challenge! Just 7 days left. With that, a reminder that Read Write Poem will culminate with the anthology featuring work from those who complete the challenge. A post with details for submitting to the anthology will be published May 1. Be sure you remove any information from the site that you want preserved — such as group content and personal messages. Those elements of the site will be removed May 1 as well. The main site will remain up as an archive.
- ‘underlife’ tour at january gill o’neil’s blog
April 20, 2010 | 8:11 pmJanuary Gill O’Neil’s virtual book tour has moved to her site and is underway now. Check out the lineup at Poet Mom.
 Archive for read write poem news »
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thank you and farewell As of May 1, 2010, Read Write Poem is no longer active.
In late May, an anthology featuring work from those who completed the Read Write Poem NaPoWriMo Challenge will be published here and on issuu.com.
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