THE POETRY BLOGGERS |
Certain poetry bloggers were “touchstones” of the community because they were known throughout the network and their posts were regularly read and commented on. The poetry bloggers “spoke” to one another through their blogs and discussed poetry and literature, in order to generate “critical discourse.” As with any community, the poetry bloggers’ community changed over time. Even in the short duration of our research, a number of the poetry bloggers began to post their original poems, though at first many considered it “egotistical.”
The poetry bloggers’ community also served the very practical needs of finding and staying in touch with like-minded community members. Jack mentioned that there was a poet at Stanford that he would have liked to know before the poet left Stanford, but he never bumped into him. Jack believed that he would probably have located the poet if he had had a blog. He also thought his blog would help him stay in touch with his Bay Area community after a planned move to another part of the country so that he would continue to be “part of this community.”
The poetry bloggers’ community sometimes generated conflict among members, as in any real community. Two conflicts that they told us about apparently grew so personal and contentious they were taken out of the blogs and channeled to email. The grievances were not aired in the blogs even though the blogs had become a “partial substitute” for email for many poetry bloggers. The nature of the conflicts was deemed unsuitable for blogs and a switch to email was made.