I don’t need another blog! This is just an annex for Via Negativa, where I began doing a weekly poetry blog digest in 2018 as one way for a socially awkward, geographically isolated poet to give back. My author website, with links to my books and other creative projects, is DaveBonta.com.
How do I decide what to include in the digest?
I follow around 200 feeds from blogs old and new, which might sound like a lot, but barely scratches the surface of what’s out there. I follow as wide a variety of English-language poets, critics and publishers as possible, but spend zero time trying to determine who the “important” bloggers are or what everyone’s been chattering about on social media over the preceding week. I think it’s more interesting to follow the same people for years, even or especially if they aren’t big-name poets, than to try to find new people to follow, but bloggers are continually running out of steam, so I do keep adding new feeds at the rate of two or three a month. I’m trying to keep the time required to assemble a digest down to five hours max, though I don’t always succeed.
As for the kind of content I typically go for: I like personal perspectives, so I am extremely unlikely ever to excerpt the kind of blog posts which, I suspect, receive the most views—advice for newer writers on how or where to get published. Aside from that, I’m interested in book reviews, single-poem analyses, accounts of how poems came to be written, new drafts of poems, how poets are responding to current events… really, almost anything poetry-related. I hope to encourage poetry bloggers to read and comment on each other, and thereby contribute to community-building in a small way.
Why subscribe?
You get my posts in your inbox. Some may want such a thing. There’s no accounting for taste. I don’t anticipate ever charging money for this service, though one never knows. (A more likely event is that the AI bots will make self-hosted blogs like Via Negativa untenable, and I’ll eventually have to relocate the whole thing over here. I hope not though.)
