Wednesday, February 23, 2011

"This is my letter to the World"

Wrote Emily Dickinson, "That never wrote to Me-"

And blog posts, I think ,come from a similar impulse, though we who write them have as much resemblance to Dickinson as a slug has to a Super-Nova. We write hoping someone will want to hear what we say. We write, possibly deceiving ourselves, thinking we have something interesting to tell the world. And we do try to tell the world. But there are millions of us, and unless we are unusually articulate or have thousands of Facebook "friends", our words just slosh around in a Cyber-Sea.

There was an article a few days ago in the New York Times that said that blogs were fading away. That they are of no interest to Youth, whose brains find it hard to compose anything longer than 140 characters. Blogs are now the province of the Un-Y
oung, who err in thinking it takes time to tell a story-

And what would a genius such as Dickinson do today with her poems? Not publish them in a blog.

"How public, like a frog!" she would write. That is if she was allowed to become a poet at all. If her family instead turned her over to the psychiatrists and their DSM-1v and their Paxil and Prozac-

1 comment:

Out on the prairie said...

That blogsphere may have worked well for Emily, it may have been the release she needed.I enjoy her work and it is sad she was not recognized while she was alive. Think of all the practice many of us get by writing all the time.My kids do it texting and on Facebook, finding it funny I don't do either.