Jean Vengua
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i have walked with you now unpoliced after hours
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through cities bordering the unknown fugue states
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where it is permitted to approximate touching
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nothing is explained nor provides egress from
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cut verbs phraseology of lost homing pidgeons
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their flight patterns cite negative number games
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snow falls pressed on cement the imposition of
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memory never occurs in our eyes there is the work
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on this shift to create naked subjects and predicates
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some yes survive horrors of beauty of manufacture
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good behavior is not tonight our walk unhinged
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from time is it or what we finally say in the rain
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AB - To blog or not to blog, this is the question…
AB - How would you characterize your blog you should describe it to one of us, i.e. another blogger?
JV - Okir has no set identity, except that it tends to focus on poetry, among other things, and it was meant to meander, much like the okir design motif, found in textiles and woodcarvings in the southern Philippines.
AB - I sometimes regard my blog as a safe place where I can meet my chosen people, is this the same for you?
JV - It's a strangely comforting virtual home, where I often greet friends and visitors -- despite the fact that it's not completely "safe."
AB - I am wondering do we sometimes forget that personal remarks, notes, poems are there for everybody to be seen?
JV - I don't think I ever really forget that anyone can see those notes, but sometimes I care more than other times.
AB - Do you post many poems on your blog? Is there an actual difference in-between publishing online, mainly through a blog, or printed publishing?
JV - When I first started blogging poetry, that's almost all that I posted -- one poem after another. I wrote everything in html code on a geocities website called The Nightjar Logbook, http://www.geocities.com/gier99/nightjar2.html There was something almost oddly meditative about writing in html. One couldn't just write a line of poetry. One had to insert code at the beginning and end of every line, and at the beginning and end of every post. I actually sort of miss doing that. It required more of a sense of commitment to each poem that I wrote. Now, on Blogger or Wordpress, one can just dash the thing off -- although one might regret it later.
Because of that process, I became very aware of the constructedness of writing online, and of hyperlinking. I would write a poem, and then go in search of images or websites, or audio that had some completely zany and intuitive connection to a chosen word in the poem. Many of my early poems had links embedded in them. Now, I never do that. I'm on the third incarnation of The Nightjar, http://thenightjar.wordpress.com which is a continuation of the second version, http://thenightjar.blogspot.com/, both devoted only to posting poetry. I often draw from these blogs when I submit poetry to journals or anthologies.
Yes, there's certainly a difference between publishing online on a blog, and publishing in print. It's the difference between immediate (more or less) and delayed gratification. One feels one's writing is part of a flow of communication and discourse online. While writing for print feels like a more isolated process. I used to feel very isolated as a poet, and very unsure of myself.
AB - What kind of actual or immaterial feedback do you receive from publishing online through a blog?
JV - Comments on the poems are always nice. But I actually value more the dialogue about poetry, reading the poems of others, reading about what they are thinking, and their own processes. And publishing my poetry online has opened me up to so many wonderful poets and people that I never would have met, never would have even known about, if it hadn't been for blogging. Many opportunities to publish have also come my way through blogging. I can't complain...
AB - What do you think of the Blogosphere when related to blogs that deal with poetry?
JV - In some ways, the fluid nature of the blogging media seems better suited to the poetry community, and especially to DIY publishers and editors of poetry, than to other types of writers (non-fiction or fiction book writers, for example) who depend on trade print publishing and its established networks and marketing machinery to get the word out, and get published. Blogging is somewhat malleable, if you know how to manipulate code and templates, and thus it's a creative form in itself, I think.