The Philosophy of Poetry Snark, Part II: On Anonymity

I saw some peeps talking about Poetry Snark on this message board, and there was some back and forth about anonymous blogs. So I thought I would go over this one more time.

First of all, anonymity has always played a vital role in the blogosphere. Many, many bloggers use pseudonyms. This is nothing new. Anonymity on blogs is, of course, in many ways an outgrowth of the medium: the fact is, in the vast majority of cases, you can't really tell if someone is telling the truth about their identity anyway, hence all the concern about pedophiles, etc. If I wanted to, I could easily make up a "real" identity behind Poetry Snark and announce it. As long as I didn't use someone's real name, there would be no way of knowing the difference. In fact, when Silliman told us he wouldn't post a link to this blog unless I provided him with a real name, I thought briefly about sending him some random name. I decided that would have been lame, so no link for us...

Secondly, as one commenter on the message board I just mentioned put it: "There's a sort of art in itself to the pseudonym." I don't pretend to any of the pseudonymical genius of Robert Frost, Henry Dagger, or R.C. Bald, but their blogs are fucking hilarious and make brilliant use of the media's fundamental anonymity.

Finally, as Trochee discussed in a previous post, anonymity can be a healthy corrective for what I've elsewhere called the "cult of niceness" infecting American poetry. It is only in the 20th-century that signing one's name to literary reviews became the norm. If you take the time to look back to previous eras--times when poetry enjoyed a healthier relationship to public audiences and a more prominent cultural role--you'll find that many, many reviews were anonymous. In some of the snarkiest and best journals, like the Edinburgh Review (our favorite), most reviews were anonymous. Also, the stakes are pretty low here: nobody sitting on a tenure committee or with their hands on the grant money is going to take a blog like Poetry Snark seriously. And it's not like we're making serious accusations or attacking peoples' ethics or their fundamental characters. We think the poets we snark can handle it just fine, and it they can't, that says more about them than it does about us. As anyone reading our comments sections can tell, we welcome all snark and delight in all the snark you all have heaped on us (and that we here heap on each other). So snark on, snarkers, for as Yeats once put it, "we traffic in snarkery." (Hmmm, something tells me ol' "monkey glands" Yeats wouldn't have liked this blog...)