privacy & exposure

This process of building websites, and doing an online notebook, raises for me issues of privacy and exposure – how much to reveal? What really is the interest of the (unknown) audience? & when may I name names, and when may I not?

Is the reader knowledgeable enough to realize that poetry is fiction, that the poet is only sometimes the speaker, and sometimes not?

Putting it all out for the whole world to see, even if the world is not looking. Does one want the world to look?

Feeling the need to justify, to explain. After so many years of cautious aloofness (or perhaps shyness; it looks different from different vantage points) to set out my inner life on colors that add light instead of diminish it.

& so much an internal life – short on adventure and anecdote. Who but me cares that the falcon was in the garden today; the flicker at the feeder? Filling up my tiny garden with their large bird selves. Or that I am up in the night, needy for sleep, but unable to track it. Listening to my dog chew his bone.

No light in the sky tonight – first quarter moon, they say, but I can't find that, either.

Building a life from pain and small-moon nights; from sparrows and finches and box elder bugs. The things one notices in the day, and in the wide night hours.

Looking for the dark (or the light) that will fold one in. 

Comments

[Crystal]

Interestingly enough, I had an editor (from a company trying to sell me self-publishing--you might remember my post in z-talk) accuse me of having no clue about poetry and publishing because I had a public poetry blog. In a flame-filled letter (I had expressed my disappointment in them trying to con me into a sales call over the phone before they were going to tell me it was a pay for publication company), it was suggested that I'm a rather sad (as in pathetic) poet because I must publish all my work on my Web site and how could I possibly know anything about the publishing world if I did that.

It was curious to me, though, that because I posted SOME of my work online, that they assumed I was a naive poet. I didn't bother to send them links and links and links of online poets who are perfectly knowledgable, published and still carry conversations about poems and share their poetry online. They were just upset because I saw right through the con. ;)

I find that a lot of people do read my poems (at least that is what my stats say) but very very few ever comment on them. I try not to think about what that means...

[SB]

Perhaps it just means that most readers are not in 'thinking' mode; just absorbing. That is usually true for me when I'm reading a poem, unless I've been asked to critique it.

But now that my work is 'public', I do see that comments are welcome.

[Ruy Miranda]

You may want to red my free articles on shyness.