Digital Kudzu
This week I swam out into the digital ocean of websites, blogs, and dot coms. For a decade I've had a static John Lane "page" linked on the Wofford site, but it wasn't until last Thursday that www.kudzutelegraph.com officially went live on the World-Wide Web.
That's my address now. It's called a "domain name" and I own the rights to it as long as I pay the rent on the little plot of cyberspace. Through this address you can contact me (john@kudzutelegraph.com), read my work, order a great deal of what I've written through the digital bookstore Amazon.com, and see photos from my "excursions" that I take with my digital camera.
My students at Wofford can write responses this semester to assignments in forums set up and password protected, and readers of the KT can easily search for past columns they want to see again. It's like a storefront. It's bricks and mortar without the bricks or the mortar.
Web-genius Steve Adams, now of Charlotte, designed the site for me and put me through a crash course in the current web revolution called Web 2.0 before cutting me loose. He plugged me into the art of "tagging" through "del.icio.us," sharing digital photos through "flickr," sampling the world through "pageflakes," and recognizing "ambient findabilty" all around me when I see it.
Now anyone with a portal to the web who types in "kudzu telegraph," can find my site, go there, and my picture will pop up paddling past a stand of kudzu on a river. They can write me or download my work, or see what sort of websites I recommend. They can stay or go away.
I guess you'd have to say that with the launch of the digital KT, I've become not only a weekly columnist but I'm also a blogger. South Carolina already has a number of very interesting blogs. There's Tammy Stokes' "Seeding Spartanburg," and "LaurinLine," created and maintained by my former student Laurin Manning. These are both popular portals into the world of now public ideas, opinions, and issues.
Some forecasters predict blogging will peak this year with nearly 100 million people posting personal writing on web pages. If 2007 is the peak year for blogs, then I can always say that I came in at the top, and it's all downhill from here.
Can you hear a little uncertainty in my tone? Well, accepting the easy connectivity of the web today has been hard. I came of age as a poet, an artist who sees the best art as being intimate, moving mostly person-to-person. It's said Emily Dickenson wrote her poems on little pieces of paper, folded them up, tied a ribbon around them, and put them in her desk. It was decades before they were all gathered into books, almost a century before they were all collected.
Over a decade ago I published a book called AGAINST INFORMATION & OTHER POEMS (available on my website) in which I questioned through satiric poems our easy slide into "the digital age." It rang a bell with many readers. Well, now we're all in it up to our armpits, including Mr. Against Information himself. "Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself. I contain multitudes." Walt Whitman said something like that, and it sounds as if he could already see the digital hordes already marching over the horizon.
Putting up a digital shingle and inviting the estimated 2 billion web users is a different approach to writing than I grew up with. There are 25,000 people in Afghanistan, 60, 000 in Botswana, 300 in Nauru, and over a million in Puerto Rico who can now type "kudzu telegraph" into Google and end up easily on my doorstep.
Miss Emily would say it's a big leap from hiding poetry in your bedroom to having a domain name. I like to think she'd laugh, purchase www.becauseIcouldnotstopfordeath.com and hang out her own poetry shingle.
So what do I hope comes of my late entry into cyberspace? I want what every writer wants-to be read and for my work to survive. We writers used to have to count on the vagaries of taste and libraries to achieve immortality. Now all we have to hope for is that we can always pay the rent on our domain name and the power doesn't go out world-wide.