My visitors were mule deer, not pronghorn antelope. Photo by Samuel Sweet Pexels.com

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A reply to the article: Carol Rumens & the Birth of the Online Literary Commons

Dear virtual Phil,

What a surprise. Thank you for including such a stimulating delving down to the seeds of the keiretsu-cooperative in your elegant tribute to Carol and Poem of the Week, well before your outline of Ars Notoria’s birth and charter. Generous, modest, and in character. What you say about the k-c’s beginnings is true in essence but you were relying, in part, on guesswork and memory. There are important details that need adjusting.

I will do that further down, for anyone interested — that is, anyone anxious to rescue publishing from the munny-wunnies, delicious archaic Indian slang exactly right for those who put financial gain or profit above truth, ethics and the fate of culture.

My proposal was published in 2010. Since then, much of the background has changed in the wrong direction. No one who understands what follows from famous newspapers replacing lost advertising revenue with ‘data collection’ or ‘sharing with our business partners’ — which sounds dull or innocuous but refers to the selling of intimate personal information about readers’ lives and behaviour, including our every click and scroll when we visit their websites—would want them for keiretsu platform-builders, now. The BBC, because it subsists on the licence fees it collects, could be the last media giant reporting on the consequences of this lucrative nonstop monitoring, and not indulging in it. The 12 May post on its site — ‘Your car is spying on you, and it’s about to get worse’ — is a five-alarm warning.

…

Your mistakes fit what I’ve always told you I was most delighted by in my introduction to pseudonymous internet commenting. That was, learning about other opinionators strictly from the inside-out, like filled chocolates whose soft centres were all we knew, to begin with or ever, with no conception of their encasing or how that tasted. No genders. No provenance. No nationalities. No occupations. Not anyway until some, like you, chose to write autobiographically, often enthralling the rest of us. As I seldom write in that vein, you couldn’t have known enough about my context and history.

We long ago agreed that we enjoyed our time on what we called the Guardian books blog, including poetry, for mostly different reasons, but got to know each other where our fun overlapped. You’ve forgotten that unlike you, I was never a contributor of real or good poems. My thrills in the poets’ corner were in occasionally scribbling doggerel and flagrant pastiche for those fellow-bloggers, as we called ourselves then ( not fellow-commenters, the accepted term now ), who caught all my references. This was a joy I’d never experienced in a group, as I might have done if I’d read for a literature degree or joined anything resembling a poetry society in embodied life.

Because dissecting bits of the literary corpus was not my subject at university, your measured and — as far as I can gauge — accurate appreciation of Carol’s scholarly column has reminded me of how reluctantly I visited her Poem of the Week posts. For the intense pleasure she so obviously gave her loyal attendees, I wish she could have been spared to carry on writing it as a centenarian. But I was never a member of the constituency.

Academic anatomisation of literature has nearly always struck me as close to anathema — yes, I do mean offensive and ‘an accursed thing’ — because it gets in the way of what someone, perhaps T.S. Eliot, noticed: ‘Genuine poetry communicates before it is understood.’ As I have found this order strangely true of all the great works in the canon, including prose, except when time has altered usage or made it incomprehensible, I visitedPotWonlywhen urged to — often, nagged — usually by Steve, sometimes you, or another compadre who noticed me commenting in a different thread.

So it wouldn’t be true to say that writing poetry on PotW led to the keiretsu-cooperative. I cannot tell the whole story now, but the idea grew out of my dismay — in common with so many other writers — about the literary degradation that followed the annexation of publishing by commercially-oriented book editors or spreadsheet mavens, as they were called in New York in the late 1980s and 1990s.

Hunting for evidence on a search engine that anyone shared my outrage about two deviously marketed books, depressing illustrations of the collapse of literary standards, I landed in the Guardian’s comments on new fiction, one day. Here to my delight I found people now free to say what they could only have communicated before in a Letter to the Editor — easily ignored and consigned to the rubbish bin — in public, and recorded for referencing. Unmediated reactions by readers who often wrote more incisively, more illuminatingly, than the writers whose articles or blog posts they were commenting on — or who were better poets, like you contributing flash poems of your own or lightning translations of Spanish verses into English, and the reverse.

Here were some readers engaging with literature more robustly than as, say, well-educated guests at London dinner parties amusing each other with accounts of, or arguments about, what they’d been reading lately. I wondered, could this instance of interactivity — that clunk-clunk techie term denoting the great gift of the digital revolution — be a basis for a new economic structure for publishing?

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This is only a first reaction in an apparently interminable, agonising phase of uprooting — sorry I can’t say more — giving me no chance to get lost in Ars Notoria. Nearly all my recent reading has been punishingly practical. I will explain when I can. In the meanwhile … a few more comments and minor amendments of your record:

– Illustration: that’s a beautiful, ingenious human starburst by Nadirsyah Nadirsyah

– ‘Pronghorn deer’: species confusion, with or without your glasses on. My visitors were mule deer, not pronghorn antelope

– ‘Carol was tolerant, cagey, puzzled, and a little worried about the phosphorescence her weekly analysis released.’ This couldn’t be said better

– ‘One of the reasons Cheryll’s model was criticised was a lack of focus on “the ethics of content ownership.” No, I certainly didn’t get into that. The proposal was arguably overstuffed with ideas, and I could point out that I also failed to address the origin of our species; fire’s discovery as a tool; and the links between these and the English and Continental Enlightenment. … Think of the wasted time if I had, given what has happened since, that no one could have foreseen: the ‘… astronomical scale of [ copyright ] infringement that is the basis of generative AI as well as the astronomical profits that infringement has generated for tech companies.’ ( Maria Pallante, president of the Association of American Publishers and a former director of the US Copyright Office )

– ‘Clearly, Bell read Cheryll’s proposal.’ Yes, but not because I sent what the Oxford Internet Institute calls the discussion brief to her. As I remember, someone at the OII dispatched it to several editors at the Guardian, who declined to comment or join the debate

– ‘Writers at The Guardian would often dip down into threads … and you could see that the articles they wrote were sometimes inspired by online discussions. But they didn’t acknowledge it, and we thought much less of them …’ Demonstrably true. It is also happening on other newspaper sites today. It sometimes gets the idea-hijackers and credit-deniers into sticky messes. I’ve been longing for time to record a splendid example, replicated most embarrassingly for them by several other publications

– ‘In your last missives to Tanzania you said: “Our son is going completely wild …

…”’ Exquisite and almost unbearably moving, even now. From my off-blog friendship with Steve and his wife Michele — which developed after a surreptitious exchange of email addresses — I knew how close he was to dying and am sure you’re right about why he reacted as he did. Your exchange was painful — excruciating — to watch

As you say, the poetry threads could be vicious, but felt more often like swimming in a pool of oxytocin and mutual affection. Signing off in that spirit,

disembodied CB

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Cheryll Barron, Scribbler.