This is a post that every blogger, no matter how small his readership, needs to make. Because today you can find my blog with no trouble. You can find poetry blogs by experimentalists like
Ron Silliman and formalists like
Mike Snider, or international poetry blogs like
Anny Ballardini's, from Italy (and look for
my page on Anny's
Fieralingue anthology of contemporary poets). You can find the
Academy of American Poets or
Poetry Daily, which features a new contemporary poet every day--today's is
Victoria Chang, with a poem originally published in
Ploughshares. Here's a taste:
Proof
They say my great-uncle read foreign books
in a mud house in Nanking,
plowed his twenty acres, listened to
rare birds, disobeyed
the tides' yes and no. One day he knelt in the street,
sign around his neck
that said: Traitor. Little Red Book spread like wax
over him, even
beech trees turned.
You can find tiny online poetry magazines like
Snakeskin from England (look for me in Issue 118), or larger ones like
Jacket from Australia (here's
my review of
Calendars, by
Annie Finch), or
Cortland Review (look for me
here and
here). You can buy books directly from small presses like
Ye Olde Font Shoppe, which has published my books, along with those of
Dennis Doherty and, most recently, an anthology of poems from Erie, PA; or from
McPherson and Co., or the University of Georgia press (publisher of
Rachel Loden's Hotel Imperium. Or you can find
Powell's Books or the
Gotham Book Mart or the
Grolier Poetry Bookshop, if you prefer an alternative to Amazon.
You can find the
Woodstock Artists Association or the
Town of Saugerties, or the
Saugerties Artists Studio Tour or the
Saugerties Lighthouse, or, of course,
Opus 40. You can link to blogs by
Nick Jones or
Jerilyn Dufresne.
And you can do all this as easily as you can access IBM or Amazon or anything published by Rupert Murdoch. But this could change, if Congress goes through with its plan to create a two-tiered internet, one (fast) for the haves, the other (slow or nonexistent) for the havenots. Here's what
MoveOn.org has to say about it.
Congress is now pushing a law that would end the free and open Internet as we know it. Internet providers like AT&T and Verizon are lobbying Congress hard to gut Network Neutrality, the Internet's First Amendment and the key to Internet freedom. Net Neutrality prevents AT&T from choosing which websites open most easily for you based on which site pays AT&T more. So Amazon doesn't have to outbid Barnes & Noble for the right to work more properly on your computer.
The above link will take you t0 MoveOn's petition. It should be signed and sent in.
