blogolicious

It occurred to me recently that I have been blogging for a sum total of 16 years, since about mid-2002, when I started up a journal on xanga, then subsequently moved here to blogger.   Journaling, of course, was not new, but the digital medium was (I had been keeping a loose diary on and off since about 14, then a regular journal in those black and white marbled composition books since college.)  Social media did not yet exist--and in fact Xanga, like its cousin LiveJournal, was pretty much the predecessor, allowing a bit more interaction with your followers and the people in your blogroll. During the years at Xanga, I met some of the poets that I would continue to follow and later become friends with IRL.   Somewhere the archive files are saved, harvested as Xanga was shutting down a few years back.  I haven't looked at them, or migrated them anywhere else, but I'm pretty sure there were a lot of entries about making those first tenative steps into the po-biz world, posting poems I was working on. News on wicked alice, which was a couple years in.  Probably my plans to start the press. Probably by bad case of book fever (the fever almanac was accepted in late 2005, by which point this blog existed.)

In 2005 or so, the conversations that now happen in places like Twitter and Facebook were happening in that thing all of us older folks called the poetry blogosphere, and while the entries were longer and sometimes more wrought-out, the same sorts of arguments (usually men), bullying, and ridiculous in the comments section still existed, you just had to look more closely. Eventually people who write blogs moved onto writing other things or not writing at all.  People slowed their posting to occasional updates.  My blogroll was littered with inactive sites. By the time facebook showed up at the end of the decade for most of us, the age of the blog was already kind of dead. People who once posted quite regularly liked the shorter forms better.  New communities were forming in these places.

But some of us, of course, weren't quite willing to give up the ghost. Sometimes I look at pre-2009 entries (the point at which I was getting into FB) and realize much of the same sort of posting was happening here:  opinions on po-biz and my MFA studies, publication news, notes on what I'd been reading. Over the years since, with those things happening in more active arenas, my blog posts slowed a bit, more to longer entries on specific subjects, or more often, short diaristic entries that summed up the week, or sometimes the month. Every year, my New Year's resolution would include an effort to devote more time here, to occupy this space a little more.  And truly, while writing/poetry blogs were on the outs, design, fashion, and lifestyle blogs were (and still are) quite in vogue (though instagram might be giving them a run for their money.)  Even the visual artists seem to have abandoned a lot of their blogs in favor of more active instas.

But I have faith in the blog.   Last year, I joined Twitter and found it pretty uninspiring.  Sure, I found some great lit journals that were new to me, made a couple new connections with writers and editors, but in reality, posting on Twitter was sort of like dropping an occasional quarter in the ocean and waiting to see if you could actually hear it hot bottom.  Memes and gifs were fun.  That was about it. Since I am not always on my phone or even always on the internet, convos were insanely hard to follow. Facebook is a little better for discussions, but even then, the algorithms seem to have made things very quiet there (unless everyone really did in fact leave for greener pastures.)  I like instagram, but my entries on posts are pretty short because I can't type for shit on my phone.

So that leaves blogs, and I have to admit, in the past couple of years, I've been feeling more at home here. I've already made more posts this year than I did in all of 2017. This is the place where I document not only what has been going on in my life and work, but where I think out loud. Where I figure things out and plot the course of ideas. A sort of letter from behind the scenes.  It has occured to me often that given how much content is here, if I looked at it like one long writing project, it actually is probably the most prolific thing I've written...