A late night thought
The best thing about being in an MFA program is the way it feeds your reading: friends stop you in the hall to cram a photocopy of their favorite new poem into your hands, books are passed around at parties in a kind of infinite borrowing circle so that the person giving you that wrinkled paperback is probably three steps removed from the person who actually bought it. This is particularly helpful for poetry, which is so marginalized compared to other genres that even hearing about new books (especially by new poets) is difficult.
This is what I want more of from the Internet — original poems bundled with a trusted recommendation. So much of what we do online is still commentary, still meta. I want more new source material online. I want the stuff itself.
Now I’m all nostalgic for Fayetteville! I miss the kind of community you describe here. I hope others will take up your challenge.
Me too! And I think the best way to encourage poets and other writers to post original work online — to blog their drafts — would be for more literary magazines to exempt personal blogs and websites from the category of a previous publication that renders something ineligible for inclusion. I see people posting poems in password-protected posts on their blogs, which offends my blogger sensibilities, or worse yet, sharing original poems on Facebook, just to protect them from the taint of publication.
@Dave: Yeah, the whole conception of previous publication needs to be reworked. In the past, “previously published” was understood to be synonymous with “previously read,” which is why editors were so picky about publishing only new material. They didn’t want to waste their limited space on material that readers were already familiar with. They wanted to discover the new.
Nowadays, though, the fact of publication doesn’t guarantee readership at all. Lots of things are published on personal blogs that are never read, not by an audience of any size, anyway.