also, derek motion defends the life lived online here. i'm with derek on this, not that the net has diminished my love of books. far from it, as i type my copy of pinoy poetics, ed. by nick carbo [meritage press; 2004] is open to joel b. tran's essay 'Brown Faggot Poet: Notes on Zip File Poetry, Cultural Nomadism, and the Politics of Publishing' as it sits beside the computer. i've had this book for about a year now but just really started to read it. and i'm reading it serially, jumping from essay to essay, rather than straight thru. which is the way i mostly read now. often i read a book of poetry from last page to 1st. and truth be told i just finished andrei codrescu's 1970 collection license to carry a gun sitting on the john. which didn't diminish my enjoyment of codrescu's heteronyms: julio hernandez, peter boone and alice henderson-codrescu an iota.

i don't know what 'old-fashioned reading' as derek quotes the opinion-writer he takes to task quite mean now. literacy takes a multitude of forms. i believe even that email has brought back, to some degree, at least how i use email, the art of letter-writing. blogs allow me to read essays, jottings, poems, rants and raves by all manner of poets and movie-critics. i've always been a nosy bastard who'd comb the stacks in the library and bookstores for biographies, journals and notebooks of writers. the net has opened that up and the access of give and take between writers is extraordinarily fluid. we live in the era of what estonian poet jaan kaplinski called 'the wandering border'. it's the liminal space i find fascinating. the net is the great tool for that liminal space, that border that is always found and misplaced. for here the net opens those borders wandering within our own psyches and lives, both immaterial and material.

of course the computer has changed how we read and write. jean vengua [her blog is found in the links to the right] writes in her essay 'Abilidad and Flux: Notes on a Filipino American Poetics' collected in pinoy poetics that the net is where 'I write 90% of my poetry and "in public" with a minimum of revisions.' vengua continues:

It has also changed my perceptions of poetry from something "fixed" on paper, to a language that is always in flux, always changing, and even - to the extant to which I forgo the "save" command or commit the words to disk - fleeting. I am more willing, nowadays, to "let go" of my words. I no longer think of each poem solely as a unit in itself, which will someday be inserted onto a page by itself, separate from other poems on their own pages. Instead, each poem is part of a continuum on a long, scrolling page[. . .]

the net has changed our notions of literacy, but not i think killed [hold on now, here comes a silver dollar word] literature. i'll leave it at that.