For my part, last year was a lean one for Ictus as I only completed 11 posts, part of a pattern of decline since 2011 when I wrote what seems now the extraordinary number of 59 ,albeit glancing back I see that many of those were brief squibs or YouTube videos rather than considered pieces. I've certainly had less time to devote to writing in general the last few years and I suppose when I've had opportunities to write I've prioritised poems and other "proper" forms over what I see as the very much secondary, incidental jottings that comprise this blog. Secondary - but with the genuine value of keeping my hand in and allowing me to write in different, perhaps less convoluted or crafted formats and registers than other compositions allow, a narrow but refreshing tributary of the ongoing writerly process which I try to hold onto as of almost equal significance to the "finished" products that sometimes emerge from it.
What are the reasons for poets turning away from blogging? The rise of Twitter has something to do with it, I'm sure, being both a more immediate and less time-consuming platform with more assured returns in terms of often instantaneous responses from your followers, far more effective than blogging if you want to draw notice to a reading, review or new publication or even to alert fellow-poets to a particular issue or news-story. I'm not a great fan, as it all too easily leads to the "Just had a bag of cheese and onion McCoys " attention-seeking tittle-tattle of Facebook, but I can see it has its uses, which strike me as distinct from the virtues and purposes of blogging.
Which are? The possibility of a more expansive engagement with the contexts and processes of our writing; the beginnings of some kind of critical practice about contemporary poetry, sorely lacking outside a handful of specialist journals. Not that most blog-posts (and certainly very few of mine) often attain the status of serious criticism but just that they are able to contribute to a meaningful cultural debate about poetry and poetics, that the medium is used as something more valuable and enduringly readable than mere self-advertisement or diaristic anecdotage. It may be that some of the bloggers who had these kinds of aims when they begun have found other forms of internet platform better suited to their needs, which is the reason they've now moved on. In fact, who knows but that the demise of widespread blogging might have a positive aspect, if it means that the more resonant kind of poetry-blog (like Gists and Piths or the posts of Michael Peverett and Robert Shepperd) will gradually gain wider readerships and continue to develop and thrive?
