Blogs as Interruption: Branching and the Poetics of "Hi Mom"

A common trend on poetry weblogs these days seems to be the half-to-oneself, half-exhibitionist gestures that say "Hey, look what people were searching for when they ended up at my website!" Aside from being the electronic equivalent of the "Hey look Mom, I'm on TV" gesture, this expression of surprise is often a legitimate one considering some of the things our readers think they're looking for (that is, before we pull them in, Bwah-ha-ha-ha!). It's amazing how many people must come across these poetry blogs by accident, like tripping over something while they're trying to get somewhere else. For example, I get a lot of searchers who were looking for "documentary photography and appropriation"(must be a popular topic), "analysis of Yvor Winters," and particularly lately, "what is avant garde." And once in a while I get a particularly weird one, like "echoing another person."

These somewhat-misdirected searches set an interesting and useful precedent for a "branching" mode of attention, something similar to what Jakob Nielsen evokes in Hypertext and Hypermedia when he notes "Hypertext should also make users feel that they can move freely through the information according to their own needs. This feeling is hard to define precisely but certainly implies short response times and low cognitive load when navigating" If a reader's attention is already more on the "surface level" than usual while surfing the web, he or she is more likely to "branch" (a psychological term used for ADHD) upon encountering interruptions. In a way, the interruptions become the inevitable form of what the reader was looking for. The interruptions become the content itself.

This odd form of activism/terrorism is something that may define blogs as a medium (a catch-all for random objects), and it's also a characteristic they may share with media such as spam. Loss Glazier gets at this point quite effectively in his book Digital Poetics, in a list of rules outlining the characteristics of the electronic text: "The electronic text manifests symptoms of being an 'anti-text.' It is often a text that you do not want. Its value is dependent upon signal-to-noise factors, delay times, 'Not Found 404' messages (error messages that occur when you arrive at a non-existent Web page). There is often too much of it, and its excessiveness often limits your ability to spend time with the texts in which you are actually interested."

Now friends, I challenge you: can we write poetry that does this? If we're as interested in the technological possibilities of new media as we claim to be, can we do this with poems? Do we want to? If not, these blogging clothes may soon reveal themselves to be nothing more than the proverbial Emperor's (Hi Mom!) birthday suit.

Comments

[Mark L.]

Look Mom, I'm on Tim's blog!

[Tim]

Heh, you can get an APR-style picture with me for that masthead of yours, if you want. Forty bucks a pop.

[Glenn Ingersoll]

My blog the equivalent of the Emperor's clothes?

Hm.

All righty then, come on over and look at me naked!

;-)
G

[Ray]

I'm a non-poet and a 1999-era weblogger, but for what it's worth (being free publication), what I wanted from the form was to assert the value of browsing the shelves (or exogamy) against the then-prevalent emphasis on targeted lookups/marketing (or closed communities). I see little point to an artifact that does exactly what the audience expects.

Odd search strings fulfill my desires, and I'd guess that they'd also fulfill at least some of the desires of at least some of the more encyclopediac or disruptive poets through history. Contemporary poetry has a tougher time because the available publishing venues have become so constricted. Poet weblogs provide an opportunity to break that expectation, but it seems to me more a matter of publishing context than an aspect of the individual piece itself.

However, I can suggest that mentioning "Tuesday Weld," "Diary of a Nobody," and "children fucking" all within a single poem will almost certainly gain you a wide and disappointed online readership.