on the public square

i've been debating, for what seems like years, whether or not to post poetry on this blog. i don't know if this is read, for one, so it might seem like a tree falling into uninhabited woods. But, if this happens to have readership; i'd like to know and might start the electronic foray into self-publication.

That might also be a principle, extroverted insecurity of my own, but i'm also unconvinced that this Internet thing is a legitimate avenue for poetry. it still seems distant and impersonal despite all the personified profiles of facebook and myspace. Maybe this is hung on the hope that we're not so distant from one another, just distinct from the other expressions in previous eras, where poetry was read in the public square, when poetry carried upon itself the duties of storytelling and prophecy, when poetry came out of community.

Perhaps, it is our concept of community that has been so expanded and digitized that i can't see the voice poetry has for that broad a place. Because, you don't see what i see–you don't walk past the anti-Semitic graffiti underneath the train station at College Avenue like i do, you're not where i am–i'm terrified that the exercise will be meaningless. It could all be another bookmark, another RSS on your Google reader, another stop along the on-demand-and-there-it-is. But, is that any different than walking up to your bookshelf, assuming you have a bookshelf, and pulling this from it, feeling the pages in between your fingers and smelling the glue in the binding with each flick and turn?

It is certainly different, and i'm waiting to make sense of the feeling of its difference.