Greetings, Poetry People! This is my first Blogger post that will also be posted at my fledgling Substack. Find it here!
Bit by bit I hope to shift completely over to Substack for all kinds of functionally modern reasons, with due respect to Blogger for providing *my juicy little universe* with a comfortable home for coming on 18 years. I don't have Substack set up quite as I'd like yet, but I hope you'll recognize me there and subscribe and like and share and all that.
And now, this month's Inkling challenge, simply set by Mary Lee:
Great idea! I often find that I myself am leaving a Poetry Friday blog comment that, inspired by the post itself, becomes rather poetic. In fact I have a running record of such comments of my own that might become something later. But I believe Mary Lee really meant someone else's comment, so I trawled through the Comments page on the back end of Blogger.
I decided, after some internal debate, not to use this one:
🤔
But as I intentionally move into a new commentable space on the Internet, I also have to consider anew what it means to offer my poetic innards up to the public, and this one, from our friend Joyce Ray, caught my eye.
It should have that little extra piece at the bottom with the fault line, "I didn't mean to be Anonymous. It's Joyce Ray," but you see how that's a bit odd in this context. Do you think it's okay to stick with just this?
I didn't mean to be Anonymous.
Thanks to Mona for rounding us up today at her What's New? page. I'm late finishing this post (still have to put it on Substack) but the light of June is now fully illuminating the pretty murky tunnel that was May and I look forward to getting around to everyone's posts!
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***FOOTNOTE
"Thou shalt not read the comments section, lest thou covet thy neighbor’s likes. Anyone who uses social media religiously knows that there’s one main rule of the Internet. Well, one main rule besides “CATS, CATS ALWAYS”. It’s to stay outta the comments section; for the love of all that is #holy, stay out of it. Luckily the ever-wise winner of our Internet challenge did the best thing you can do short of hanging a virtual sign on every comments section that says, “HERE BE MONSTERS!”; Rodrigo Leonardo Batista Ferreira (@rodrigobhz) created a design that sums up this number one commandment of the Internet, albeit swapping the stone tablet for a touchscreen one."
---a pretty good explanation of the idea that it's wiser to post without regard to everyone else's responses; take the likes and shares and don't dig too deep, from this post at Threadless where I went to make sure I understood the concept of "Don't read the comments" correctly before I then referred to it in my post title. It's very time-consuming being a person who likes to be as factually accurate as possible all the time. Except in my actual poems, which is why writing poetry is awfully freeing, almost like an anxiety medication.
