This article and it's giant, sad whale made me think not of solitude and loneliness, though those are a very clear distinction (especially if you're the type of person, like me, who sometimes feels lonelier in crowds than I ever do alone) but more so poetry and audience and maybe even this blog a little bit. Since the days of commenting on blogs are long gone, sometimes blogging over here when everyone has moved onto the greener pastures of social media feels a little like that whale. In a way, it's freeing, to write when you feel that no one may be reading at all. Or maybe someone will read it because of some weird search term on google for "sad whale" and find it years from now. Or decades (I'm assuming the internet's memory may outlast all of us unless there is an apocalypse.)
Poetry feels this way too sometimes. there's sharing work--there's publishing in journals and the like--there are even book publications, but it's hard to guage how much of what you put out there actually reaches it's intended audience. Or any audience at all. Books sell, sometimes you get feedback, but for the amount of stuff that goes out into the world, so much lands in silence. I think about my ideal reader sometimes, and he/she is a fuzzy construct. Maybe he/she doesn't exist except in my head. Maybe I am always just slinging things into the void and hoping they hit some sort of mark.
It's also amusing to me, and a little sad, to think of this giant thing, a very obvious thing, gigantic in size moving through ocean and going pretty much unnoticed, which is how poetry in general feels sometimes. You somehow have to know where to look for it, but there it is. Very obvious and very immense.
