Society… did not favor the reading of poetry…. By the ’90s, it was all over…. consider that poetry is the only art form where the number of people creating it is far greater than the number of people appreciating it…. People don’t possess the patience to read a poem 20 times before the sound and sense of it takes hold….
I am part of a world that apotheosizes the trendy, and poetry is just about as untrendy as it gets. I want to read books with buzz… and I can’t remember the last book of poetry that created even a dying mosquito’s worth of hum. I am also lazy, and poetry takes work.
Bruce Wexler
B.I. – a poem sketch with photo
before the internet
i often read
books or magazines
during breaks and lunches
at the office —
then i ate
at my desk and surfed
web pages or placed
orders on amazon.com
for books i didn’t read
and remain in storage.
i often read
books or magazines
during breaks and lunches
at the office —
then i ate
at my desk and surfed
web pages or placed
orders on amazon.com
for books i didn’t read
and remain in storage.
now i read
books and magazines
during work breaks and lunches —
while someone else
in some other office
sells his/her x-men comic
collection and some other
digital fetus in another office
far far away
buys a x-men comic collection
during lunch hour
and later sells it
because he/her
didn’t make time
to read it.
Secrets about the internet
The most common word in search queries is “photos”. Number two? “Fotos.” The associated words indicate that people are usually searching for pictures of naked women and cars.
Blog readers don’t click on ads. Most ads are clicked by confused, lost, nontechnical people who arrived from a Google results page and think that the ad will take them to what they were really looking for. (This is why domain-squatting with ad pages is so profitable.) Many blogs have disabled ads for everyone except Google referrals without losing significant income. Many others have started showing more ads to Google referrals.
Nobody ever donates with those PayPal Donate buttons.
The majority of SEO is bullshit.
There are a lot more confused, lost, nontechnical people using the internet than any of us realize. And they greatly outnumber us.
Most internet use in the U.S. is during the workday by people browsing at work (when they’re supposed to be working). Younger people use social networks more, while older people play Flash games and read gossip sites more. Traffic on most sites drops significantly on weekends, especially popular travel weekends.
Good to know. Now how does he know that
I never use the search query for “photos” or “fotos,” nor do I click on web ads, and I’ve never donated using PayPal Donate buttons.
My internet use mainly during the workday which starts around 7 a.m. and concludes sometime around midnight or later.
Flash games are a decadent escape that rarely if ever I indulge in such behavior. Social network is often a waste of valuable time, yet I check Facebook and Tumblr at least a half dozen or more times a day.
Yet the question remains: What is the qualitative and quantitative data for Marco’s report?
Sunset at the Arboretum: The North Carolina Arboretum (http://www.ncarboretum.org/)
Caffeinated poem: A few weeks ago I had compiled a set of poems to submit to various poetry contests including Boston Review. But I was reading Robert Pinsky’s book Gulf Music and never sent them. It’s not that I forgot to send them. It is just that compared to Robert Pinsky, my poems appear un-submittable. So instead I wrote a poem on a paper cup after drinking a latte from The Dripolator.
Dylan Thomas… is… the proto-rock star, priapic, Dionysiac, excessive: possessed of a richly turbulent emotional life; the Jim Morrison… of his day. And Dylan Thomas was probably the last poet to be as famous as a rock star; he gives fame a certain class.
Nicholas Lezard
Coffeehouse Junkie 