I’m reticent to write for blogs because of Comment Field
Bullies (CFBs). If you’ve ever written for one, or had your own, the odds are that they’ve made your
life miserable for a few days.
I don’t even read blogs anymore, really—because when I
finish a post that someone took the time to write (maybe it’s not brilliant—maybe it’s too brilliant and I
don’t understand a word of it) up pop the CFBs, trashing the joint like rednecks at a
state park: Carving their names into trees, kicking empty beer bottles in the
lake, tossing Aquanet cans in the camp fire, and hollering loud enough to scare the
animals away. They’re exactly the
kind of Yahoos I want to avoid when I have a moment to catch up on the news in
Poetryland.
And, like rednecks, you can’t reason with CFBs. “Excuse me,
the park’s here for all of us. Could you guys could keep it down…or maybe just
pick up your trash?”
“You don’t like it?! What are you gonna do, little baby? I
read your last book!! It was for babies!!! Aw, is the little baby cry now? Hmmm?!?” They throw lit fire crackers
at your feet as you flee.
You got your Selfless Emoters and Self-Centered Emoters,
Worshipping Starf*kers and Upwardly Mobile Starf*kers (which sound like a yoga
poses), Genuine Dissenters and…Asshole Dissenters.
Their “comments” inevitably get personal—if not towards the writer, towards other commentors: “You would say that, Todd, because you’re a moron,” or “Jane, you ignorant slut.” Like Self-Centered Emoters , they feel very strongly about things—mostly about how wrong everybody else is. To quote Stevens, they are “the wind that lashes everything at once.”
They’re so
emphatic, you may wonder, “Is this person right? Am I ‘selfishly diluting the
sanctity of American vernacular’ ? ”
If a stranger walks into my apartment raving about a
blatantly stupid thing I've done, my first reaction is to believe that I’ve
done something wrong. If I find
out this person did the same thing to everyone in my building, I think, “What a
friggin' whackjob.”
When the Harriet blog first started on the The Poetry
Foundation's website, I was impressed with the manners of the commentors. I
went away, and when I came back,
about a year later, the CFBs had totally trashed the place.
Then Harriet posted this.
A year later, Harriet mothballed their comment fields
entirely (and yes, I do read it more now).
I asked editor Cathy Halley if they scrapped the comment
fields because CFBs. “Our decision to evolve Harriet was based on the fact that
so many vibrant conversations are happening on poets' personal blogs, on
Facebook, etc. Rather than trying to host those conversations, we felt it was
important to acknowledge them and send folks to where they naturally occur.”
Isn’t that a nice way to phrase it? Seriously.
Many blogs no longer automatically post comments—they must be approved first. No doubt by
someone very sick of CFBs.
My favorite poetry blog is written by a hilariously
brilliant dude who makes me feel smarter every time I visit. He gets a good
deal of traffic, so of course, they love taking dumps in his comment field.
“Why do you let these yo-yos on your blog?” I asked him. “I basically see
comment boxes as like a party where invited and uninvited guests come in and
start shit and sometimes you've just got to go in there and turn the firehose
on everyone.”
Do other niche bloggers suffer this blight of Asshole
Dissenters? My friend’s a jewelry designer. The kind of comments she gets on
her blog could not be less dissenting. “Way to go!” and
“Gorgeous!” and “It reminds me of Paris!”
So why are poets besieged by CFBs? I heard once that the
more marginalized a population is, the more propensity individuals in that
population have to marginalize each other. Animal Farm.
When I asked my friends (none of them would allow me to
mention them by name) for their thoughts on CFBs, this was my favorite.
“1. By definition, identifying as an Important Professional
Poet (IPP) requires pervasive grandiose thinking, which is a sign of clinical
narcissism; many (if not all) self-described IPPs are narcissists.
2. Like all narcissists, IPPs have no inner sense of value
or selfhood, so they need constant external proof that they are valuable and
alive.
3. IPPs read the entire internet, from cover to cover, every
few hours, posting squibs here and there, just to make sure they still exist as
IPPs. They fantasize that everyone is talking about them everywhere, all the
time.
4. When IPPs can't drum up enough external proof of their
greatness, they become terrified and enraged, because to them, without
continual external validation, they would cease to exist.”
And with that, below is an virgin comment field in which my
infantile effigy should burn as brightly and long as a wheelbarrow full of whale blubber.
