whoa! i'm offline for the weekend [i check my emails and perhaps click very quickly thru a few favorite blogs, but for the most part i usually spend weekends with anna and nicholas] and come back today to read kari edwards has passed away. the news hit me in the gut like a suckerpunch. i didn't know hir but for hir work i've read thru journals online and off. and also hir blog. i have a deep admiration for both edwards' texts and hir activism. i don't remember if it was on jim goar's, or kyle kaufman's, blogs where i said how i admired a poem of kari's in the comments section. s/he also replied too, and i was rather pleased only for the very small fact that s/he, however briefly, knew my name.

i'm blown away by the suddenness, the news of, hir death.


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i think it was ernesto priego [apologize for not linking to ernesto's blog, using wi fi which is more efficient i found for surfing the web, but doesn't afford me the easy ability to open up new windows or tabs for linkage] who wrote a very beautiful, very eloquent defense of poet-blogs. i've long become an advocate of the medium. blogs don't, they can't, replace the pleasures of talking to yr friends face to face, or holding a book, journal, zine, chap in yr hands, but they do allow writers the space to write about their poetics, publish poems, connect with brothers and sisters in the art, and so on.

i think it was mark young who wrote an essay published in an online zine about why he also loves blogs, the online community, and so on. a while back i finished a collection of essays, the undertaking: essays in the dismal trade by thomas lynch, who is a poet-undertaker. in the collection lynch somewhere calls himself an unkown international poet. i liked the phrase enough that i quoted it later in an email to a fellow poet i admire. that is how i consider myself, among the poets also in our aether.

so what i want to read in a poet's blog: a bit of journal entries, poems, fragments, the odd thought, personal life, and essays about whatever that poet is into. e. g. movie reviews, sports, pop culture, painting, you name it. as long as the subject is written with passion and reverence. no small word, reverence. but that is why we're at it, why we approach language. i'm a godless man who is always in the act of prayer.