State of the Sphere
 

On a recent thread in Metrical, a few long-time Sphereans were noting the decline in intensity and interest on this website—a forum which, thanks to Alex, has been a boon to so many of us. “Things aren’t what they used to be,” was the gist.

And although it’s true that things are and never were what they used to be, the decline on the Sphere is obvious and has been going on for a quite a while now. I suppose that everyone has noted it. There are fewer dynamic discussions, less engagement, less energy, less creativity.

A number of talented people have come and gone from this site, and there is nothing surprising about that. People move on. That’s life. But there is no reason that the same energy and engagement couldn’t be maintained with an ever-renewing membership. And yet the heyday of the Sphere seems to have come and gone. Or has it? Is it just a (by now very long) phase, or an inexorable decline?

One thought I’ve had is that facebook and other social media have taken the forum’s place for a lot of people. When the Sphere started, the internet was still new and its options narrower. Another thought is that nothing good lasts forever. I’m thinking that other people here might have more interesting thoughts on the subject.

If there’s already been a thread on this, sorry about that. I haven't seen one.

I don't notice anydecline. Beware of old person's dismay.

Also, at times, beware of an old person's memory.

Richard

Ha!

I am going to try to post a poem every week or so. For my own momentum against the new semester push. And try to write crits that amuse myself at the very least. I was hard on workshopping once. For my own needs at least, I was wrong. I think the game is worth playing. I say if your a poet then post more poems, take more risks of the them sticking your braids in the inkwell by posting the poems that are pale and gangly or have freckles shaped like night creatures. Bring out your freaks. Bring out your dead. Especially all you cool kids lurking in the balconies. Bring.

Oh.. and join the metrical and non-metrical boards. Face the day.

Well, I'm older than John, and I can still remember a time when I had a memory.

Being in denial can be an extremely effective way to tailor-make reality to your own measurements, John, as you’ve shown in so many discussions here.

I’m talking posters’ traffic, comments, insights literary and otherwise, curiosity, more posts about poetry than about people’s self-promoting interests: a gregarious disinterested online poetry community. It’s still there, but sorry, it’s a skimmed thin version of what it was.

Andrew, you’ve actually already been a huge breath of fresh air. Must be the Maine pines.

I think many factors are at play in the decline in participation on the Sphere. One is certainly the declared policy of a number of journals of not accepting any poems that have appeared anywhere online, if they can be found by searching. I noticed a big drop-off in posting as a result of that, and it led to password-protected sections in Drills and Amusements. By the way, to my eye Drills and Amusements is still quite active. I think that has partly to do with the extra password protections, but also to do with the general air of mutual encouragement among those who post there. That used to be more true of the poetry boards than it is today. There have always been occasional blowups of accusations and insults on the boards, but they seem more common these days, and the result does seem to be that some people lose interest and go elsewhere.

I suppose that many people, like me, have jobs that keep them very busy most of the time. I post poems and crit when I have poems to post, but those become fewer when I am busy doing other things. I may look in occasionally, but I only comment when something catches my eye and I have some specific suggestion that I can make quickly. I am most likely to look at poems by poets whose aesthetic is closest to mine, because my suggestions to them are most likely to be helpful. They are also the ones whose suggestions for my own poems are most likely to be helpful to me. I'm not on Facebook and I don't have any colleagues who write much in form, so when I want feedback on a poem, I have to come here for it. So long as I get some comments I can use, I expect that I will continue to do so.

Susan

I love your "Bring out your freaks. Bring out your dead," Andrew...but at the same time I have strong misgivings about encouraging people to post something every week, no matter how awful it is.

Good, or at least promising, poems attract and retain the sort of people who care deeply about quality. Mediocrity tends to drive those people away.

Also, I think John is right that the activity in Drills and Amusements seems to be bubbling right along, and I think that the password protections for two subforums there has a lot to do with that. I know that this has been discussed to death, but changing The Deep End to a password-protected forum like the Deep Drills on D&A would encourage more activity from shy folk...and I don't think making TDE private would detract at all from the Met Board, because some people do want a wider audience.

[Cross-posted with Susan.]

Yeah, more posts could mean mediocrity. At first. So keep the crits robust. I don't see any evidence of a fire in danger of too much green wood, too fast. I am not suggesting a mass email to the hallmark society. I am imagining specific poets lounging about bringing an arm load as a consistent habit. One mouth, one vote.

Hear, hear! And my wish is that a password-protected Deep End could be for poems in any form, with or without meter and rhyme.

I've often advocated for a password-protected forum, and the only real argument against it seems to have been that having the forums visible to the general public is how we attract new members. If people are now beginning to see the lack of password protection as a disincentive to posting, that rationale fades in importance. As far as the new member issue is concerned, it ought to be enough if we have a guest log-in account that lets people read any forum if they go through the slight effort of logging in.

Many folks from the 'sphere have published books now, and I suspect it's hard to keep the enthusiasm for workshops up after some success and recognition. I'd frankly like to see all of the poetry forums password-protected if that will keep the poems off Google.

I agree with Julie and Mary. After all, having two 'open' metrical boards has seemed unnecessary to some of us for a long time. Making The Deep End password-protected would a) help to reassure those who don't post for fear of being pirated, and b) thereby perhaps give a new lease of life to TDE, which is currently showing only spasmodic signs of life. Those who still react with wild laughter in the throat of plagiarism could continue to post on the open Metrical board.

And it would make a neat counterpart to its older sibling, Deep Drills.

Can somebody point to an actual case - beyond the British humor competitions we have protected in Drills & Amusements - where a poem was rejected because it was workshopped on the Sphere? I'm willing to listen, but I just don't see this as a significant problem.

I do agree with Andrew F. re the deterioration of the Sphere. A number of active and talented players are no longer as active, and I'm seeing less good poetry (including my own), less good crits, and more let's-talk-about-the-meaning-of-life or let's-talk-about-me blather. There always seems to be a run of this from July to September - both the summer school break, and the return, seem to impact the Sphere, and then things seem to improve as the academic year progresses, but overall the Sphere ain't what it used to be (look at the tiny impact of Shaun Russel's well-meaning attempt to restore The Deep End) and I can't blame the lack of a pass-word protected forum. I hope it's not Gresham's Law.

Michael, I can't point to such a case since my memory is bad, but I do believe someone here once reported having a Poetry acceptance rescinded as a result of being posted here. Perhaps I'm mistaken.

But that doesn't really matter, for a couple of reasons. I submit to at least one top children's market that would, in my judgment, turn down a poem if they discovered it online in any form whatsoever. I have not suffered the consequences because I know their policy and have therefore been wise enough not to test it.

But more fundamentally, even if there were no danger of editors disqualifying work that appears here, I still see absolutely no reason why anyone would prefer to have their work-in-progress displayed for all the world to see. I get it that you don't mind having your work-in-progress publicly displayed, but your preference for having it publicly displayed seems to suggest that you view the workshop at least in part as a showcase, which it's not supposed to be. If you don't view the workshop as a showcase, then I can't for the life of me understand why you are reluctant to indulge those of us whose sense of privacy is different from your own.

Again, the only rational reason I have heard for not making a password-protected workshop area would be the idea that public display of the workshops helps recruit new members, and without new members the community will perish. I accept that, but I also would suggest that the community is facing an equal or greater danger from the unwillingness of so many poets to post their work in a public forum.

Michael, this is from Rattle's guidelines for submission:
Rattle does not accept work that has been previously published, in print or online (we do consider self-publishing to blogs, message boards, or Facebook as publication if it can be viewed publicly without login).

I have submitted to Rattle many times and have never been accepted there. My submissions have always contained poems that I have workshopped here. Admittedly, there are many reasons that my work may have been rejected, but I have to wonder whether one of them might be my workshopping. I think Rattle's policy is wrong and does a lot of harm to online workshops of poetry. But Rattle will do what the editors please. To me, the benefits of workshopping poems outweigh the benefits of getting into Rattle, so I may just stop submitting there. But it would be nice to be able to do both.

Susan

Maybe tangential, but...

The ever-shrinking community of poetry never fails to find new ways of shrinking itself anew. Poetry is not a tube of toothpaste that should be returned to the merchant because the package has already been tampered with. Nor should poetry soil from frequent use. Anyway who's clamoring for bootleg copies of unreleased material? Any eye, however it is attained and wherever it's caught peering, is both a good eye and a potentially market-enlarging eye for the craft. A third-world nation that erects tariffs slits its own throat. Nobody's buying in the first place.

It's a shame the erstwhile proponents of poetry betray an allergy to used poetry as though they too believe it's a consumable like knitting. No wonder the latter is beating our socks off. I say this to the editors out there who seem to be on a first-order mission of proving their genius for 'surfacing fresh talent' or 'undiscovered jewels'. As usual, it boils down to everything but the poetry. Has the whole world lost the place to an emporium mentality, poets too?

I agree that the idea of not publishing work that has been published before is often just plain silly in application. If you published a wonderful poem ten years ago in a regional literary magazine that ran off 700 copies and managed to sell a few dozen in the local bookstore, why on earth would an editor who admires that poem and would otherwise want to publish it today have a problem with that? Is he really worried that his readers will know the poem and feel they have been handed recycled goods?

It speaks (unwitting) volumes to what the inner circle (poetry's keenest advocates, God help it) think of poetry, appraise it, value it. Enough blaming the telly-watchers. We have located the malaise --and it lies at the center of the art.

Yes, it's tangential (Norm's #17). But that's okay. It's so difficult to wade through the language and pick up your argument that I think "tangential" is the least of the problems. But I do feel that when a site dedicated to poetry overflows with this kind of convoluted double-somersault-with-a-reverse-twist approach to making a simple point, it doesn't encourage participation by poets.

Susan - I believe (90% sure) that one of our members had a dialogue with Timothy Green, the Editor of Rattle, and Tim indicated that he had no problem with publishing poems which had been workshopped at the Sphere because, among other reasons, they were only up for a short period. I'll try to find it later, but possibly somebody else recalls this - or will indicate that I mis-remember.

(I've never been published in Rattle either. I've been blaming it on the Gods, but if you are right, at least I'll have a better excuse. But I don't think you are.

Just wishing to express strong agreement with Roger's #18.

"But I do feel that when a site dedicated to poetry overflows with this kind of convoluted double-somersault-with-a-reverse-twist approach to making a simple point, it doesn't encourage participation by poets."

Well there you go. My prose may explain everything. Tell me, how many poets do you reckon you've personally marched off this workshop? I would say over the years it has to number in the dozens.

Personally? Name one or two. Name a single good poet I've personally chased off or discouraged. Have I been involved in a general sense of frustration when a new member is (a) clearly an amateur, and (b) lashes back critters - yup! Have I identified a few trolls? Yup? Have I (with others) approached beginners in a few cases and suggested alternate sites where they would feel more at home - sure! And if some of use didn't do that, the Sphere would be a far less demanding and useful place to the level of poets it aims at.

In case you're interested, Norm. I think almost everybody would agree that the Sphere was at its best when Alan Sullivan - the Editor from Hell - was running the Deep End. If there was a way to restore that mind set, I would be delighted.

As far as my occasional comments on your prose are concerned - why not? Are we to only criticize overdone and overworked poetry, but ignore prose? But you write to call attention to yourself, Norm. Those sentences and constructions don't happen casually. So I paid attention. Unfortunately, I'm not crazy about your style. I think it interferes with the points you're making.

Your trouble with my prose style is well-advertised Michael and not without its merits I'm sure. So I'm not crouching in a fetal position and I welcome the push-back. As I was remarking to someone the other day, you're an abysmal patronizer and I happen to like that about you. Alas names don't come to mind mainly because you chased them off too quickly.

Somewhere in the mix of accessibility, outreach, uncompromising standards, password protection and perhaps more sympathetic poetry editors, there's a secret sauce recipe. I don't claim to know what it is. I do believe if editors were thinking more strategically they would realize a workshop of this type can only improve the quality of the field. Clearly that's in their best interests.

The password protection for at least one poetry forum makes sense. It is not a point I’d have thought of, but if that makes some people more interested in posting good or poems with good potential, hell yeah, let’s do it.

Besides that, I think it sucks energy from the place when members use it mainly or almost exclusively as a forum for self-promotion. Nothing wrong with self-promotion, but if the people getting that advantage from the forums don’t also contribute something more substantial, things break things down to the big E: Ego. And Ego is basically dull, no matter whose it is.

I also think that too many people on the poetry and translation boards don’t give back for the crits they receive. It’s not uncommon to find people receiving all kinds of feedback for their work and offering hardly anything back.

Both these things break up the flow. The give-and-take, which is all the place really has to go on.

That's was me. And that was about the gist of it. Susan, if you like I can PM you a copy of the email response I got from him.

This is an interesting thread -- one that comes up every year or two, but interesting nonetheless. I can't deny some slight amusement over the fact that this was posted ten hours ago, as I write this, and has now had 27 responses and 430 views. Empirical though that evidence may be, I think a lot of people are still here, but they just don't post as much as they used to.

All of the options are in Alex's hands, of course. Bearing that in mind, I'm not personally averse to seeing TDE become password-protected. If that helps to drum up postership and readership, I'm all for it. I don't quite see the connection between lack of posters the way things are and increased posters with a password-protected portal, however.

I did try / have tried / am trying to boost TDE readership, but I think it's out of my hands, really. Posts there over the past year have usually received a lot of good feedback, and there don't seem to be many poem-posters unhappy with the tenor of responses. There just needs to be more people posting there. My predecessor tried posting his own work on a regular basis to drum up activity, but that didn't work. I've tried to reiterate the (possibly ostensible) difference between TDE and Metrical, but that hasn't worked. I've appealed to former member / current friends of mine to post there, but that hasn't worked. Most of what I've done as a mod has gone on in forums other than the one assigned to me, which is unfortunate.

Long story short: I don't think the 'Sphere is dying, or even rapidly shrinking, but there probably should be something done to revitalize TDE and other forums. I'll be damned if I know what that something is.

Anyone seen Holly recently?

For what it's worth, the "running off" allegations have been around for as long as I've been here...which is not as long as many others, of course, but is still a considerable chunk of time. Here's the thing: the members who are most often accused of "running people off" have been here for a very long time. They've been here through the 'Sphere's high times and its low times. They've been constants, is what I'm getting at, meaning that I don't think the "running off" theory has much weight, or else it would have been a major issue long before now (and I'm not convinced that's the case).

Michael,
The idea that Norm's posts drive folks off is stupid.

I was under the impression that workshop threads were deleted after a short time, so password protection was never much of an issue for me. The issues for me are i) working up the nerve to post a poem, and ii) making the commitment to read others’ work carefully and sympathetically, and to comment accordingly. The combination of i) and ii) can feel like a big ask to me. But I’ve recently been toying with posting in non-met, which is increasingly interesting to me. So maybe I’ll follow Andrew M’s exhortation.

I agree with Andrew F that members who show up only to self-promote, or only to engage in reciprocal promotion, degrade the site.

I do have a question that I’ve been longing to pose to other poets for some time – about their internal censors – that I’ll post here in G.T. A small step, perhaps.

Here are two probably unhelpful comments:

1. When I first came to the Sphere more than ten years ago, I think the first thread I read was something just like this one, and there have been several since then through the years.

2. I have been away from the site for significant periods of time over the years. Sometimes the resaons for dropping off have been big arguments about policies and moderator behavior, etc. But those reasons by themselves don't usually keep me away long. The main reasons for my own disappearances, and certainly for the longest of them, are usually a constellation of personal, professional, familial, and other matters that take my attention away from the Sphere, from poetry, or from both. I suspect that is the case for many people.

If there is any conlusion suggested by these two comments, it might be that what makes people come and go isn't all about the Sphere. What the Sphere has to offer is strong and gives me (and perhaps others) ample incentive to return. There is a danger sometimes in seeking "solutions" -- "Striving to better, oft we mar what's well."

David R.

One point I haven't seen is that a poem posted on one of the boards is probably going to be revised by the author before it's submitted somewhere. Thus, it generally wouldn't be the same poem that got crits.

Also, for the record, the only poem I've ever had in Rattle was in fact workshopped here, and may have even appeared in a Bakeoff or some such.

David R.

I have always ignored entirely any stuff about a poem posted elsewhere> I have had poems accepted twice in different journals but so what. And, as Sam says they are often different in detail. We mustn't let ourselves be dictated to.

What Michael says is always interesting but actually makes little difference to me. Ann and Sam are my touchstones, and Susan too. Norman often has intersting things to say and others too. I am sorry for Holly going. I find his poetry attractive and distinctive. As for memory, I often forget my own poems and am surprised anew at their distinction.

Brian, you are not much older than I am, as I remember.

I deprecate Michaels's dismissive tone regarding the Drills and Amusements. Some of the best poems can be found there.

John - there was absolutely no intention to be dismissive of Drills & Amusements. I am aware that at least one of the British magazines (I forget which, just as I'm also not sure whether to say "British" or "English" or UK) makes a fuss about it, so we've set up a special protected board. All I did wanted to do was acknowledge that situation.

Both not engaging with others’ poetry and running off when called on it were the same reflex: the prima donna reflex (located somewhere south of the ‘I gotta be me’ gland, I believe). If it weren’t true that he was getting thoughtful crits without reciprocating, he wouldn’t have left when Michael called him it.

Sorry Michael. I got you wrong.

I can't agree with you about Holly, Andrew. The Sphere is poorer without him. Perhaps his hide is not as tough as mine. I don't care what anybody says. Well almost anybody.

I miss Holly too. He was probably my favorite poet here, which is saying a lot. The 'Sphere IS poorer without him.

That said, it was ultimately his decision to leave, and it is true that he offered very little in terms of criticism to other poets. I want him back, but he would need to show some more quid pro quo.