Robert P. Baird
Dear Poetry Foundation:
You’ve always been good to me personally, and I hope you know that I appreciate much of what you do for the world at large—not least this, of course, but also this and this and this. And yet while I don’t want to get sentimental about what was always, except for a brief run, an uneven forum, it makes me a little sad that the old Harriet had to die so that posts like this one could live.
I know that annotated link aggregation is the wave of the internet future—er, let’s say present to near-past—and I recognize that you have far higher hopes for the Huffington Post’s book section (with PHOTOS!) than I’ll ever be able to muster, but I still can’t help but think you gave up a format that was original and often interesting for one that everyone else is reproducing ad infinitum. (Though I didn’t recognize it at the time, it now seems strange to me that you cited Twitter and Facebook as reasons for retooling the blog to do precisely those things that Twitter and Facebook are already good at: commenting on existing material.)
And it’s not just format. Possibly I’m underestimating the ways in your schadenfreude about the Paris Review’s rejection mistake, the nauseatingly trivial “debate” over Ron Silliman’s comment policy, and Anis Shivani’s unalloyed hackitude are making the world a better place for poetry, but if so, I’ve yet read the argument that convinced me. Likewise with the running record of poetry’s pop-culture appearances. Poetry—the abstraction, not the magazine—is not a starlet whose every public appearance has to be captured for posterity; if the art is to survive, it will do so in the hands of readers, not paparazzi.
Anyway, I’m sure if we had the old Harriet back tomorrow it wouldn’t take long before I ate these words, and that’s not the only reason I’ll probably regret posting this note in, oh, about 43 minutes. But still, and with sincere respect for your hard work, there’s my $0.02.
xo,
rpb
UPDATE (8/10/10): Well, it took a bit longer than 43 minutes, but regret has come as predicted. It’s not Harriet’s fault that the internet has gone sillier than usual lately, and it’s not her fault that it’s August and I’m chained to my desk with any kind of parole still at least a month away. I would like a higher class of ephemera to read in my off-minutes online, but it’s no one’s responsibility to serve that up to me. Apologies to all, especially the Harrieteers, for the grumbling.