SOME NOTES ON BLOGGING ABOUT POETS AND POETRY

Here at TGAP I am amazed at how a blog can reach out. Robert Pinsky, Gilian Conoley, Arthur Sze, C.D. Wright, Forrest Gander and others have responded to my posts over the past few months. Blogging is awesome!

Back in March I attended a reading celebrating Jim McMichael. Robert Pinsky, an old friend, was reading there as was Frank Bidart. I ended up writing a post not about Robert Pinsky nor about Jim McMichael but about Bidart's reading:

SOME NOTES ON FRANK BIDART'S TRANSLATION OF TU FU WITH A BRIEF RESONANCE FROM HIS BOOK OF POEMS "DESIRE"

http://greatamericanpinup.blogspot.com/2005/03/some-notes-on-frank-bidarts.html

I posted on Bidart's Tu Fu translation because I too have worked on translations of Chinese poetry and found his approach of interest.

I again have had the wonderful experience of connecting with a writer I first posted about at TGAP. Last week Frank Bidart contacted me about my post. I mentioned in my original post that I had not seen his translation in print and because of that limitation my response would be limited. Frank took notice of this when he read the blog post and in his communication sent me the text of his translation. So...in short order you will see a refresher on Bidart's unpublished translation "Tu Fu Watches the Spring Festival Across Serpentine Lake" his version of Tu Fu’s Ballad of the Lovely Women.

This does bring to the fore the dynamism of blogging. It can bring such immediate response from an audience and from the writer one is writing about. Yet the blog posts hang on the Web as long as the blogger wants them there. In this case, three months after my post the writer came across the post and found it worthy of a response. Blogging has this ability of extending discussions in ways that no other medium can. I've found this blog capable of discussing topics and extending discussion of these topics to people I had no other way of communicating with.

Nothing earthshaking here, just wanted to express my gratitude to all the writers--those I mentioned and those I didn't mention--for responding to posts here at TGAP. Equally I want to thank the folks who stop by and read the posts and post their own thoughts. These comments are even more important than those coming via e-mail from established writers. Without the comments and the visitors what would be the point?

With gratitude...