Maggie Zurawski named her blog Minor American (MA), a deflationary and certainly semi-constricting descriptor, the American part, anyway -- and yet this is a name that she has gone on to share with co-bloggers, Ange Mlinko from fall of 2004 thru spring 2005, and Kathryn Pringle starting March 2006. The minor part of the name is key, I think, but to get to this, first, a couple of disclaimers. At the outset, if I may, I don't want to imply false intimacy by referring to all three bloggers by their first names -- I've not met Kathryn (aka Kate), for instance; rather, for me to use last names here would conflict tonally with the sense of openness and negotiation that Maggie, Ange, and Kathryn have upheld in their blogging. Second, with regard to MA's brief history, as much as I want to simplify it, that is, to say something like: let's concentrate on Maggie who's been the "thread" between Ange and Kathryn: I can't. At least not that simply. I can say that Maggie got everything rolling, but from the beginning, October 2004, she was engaging Ange as a responder to her posts about Bernadette Mayer, the New York School and language poetry. A month later Ange was a co-administrator posting to the blog, sometimes in a dynamic conversation with Maggie, other times following up different ideas. (After a few months of collaboration, as we know, Ange started her own influential blog.) But from the beginning and even during the year when Maggie was sporadically posting on her own, and most especially now when Maggie and Kathryn are posting as a team of "minor americans," the atmospherics of openness and negotiation are integral to MA's unique value.

As I said, though, Maggie got things rolling with questions, such as ones about the use of dailiness, one poet-generation to the next; clear distinctions, such as the one that differentiates between language poets who visually observe (Grenier, Silliman) and those who play (Andrews, Bernstein); and, most useful, readiness to change her mind! (aka thinking out loud). Here's one example of the latter, a paragraph from a post from October 2004 on Maggie's reading Bernadette Mayer's Midwinter Day.

...I have this strange relationship to Mayer. I want to be hard on her because so many woman in my circle of friends tried to use her as a model for how to live as a poet and I don't really think she's the best model and of course it's kind of a cannibalistic use of the poet here. What can she do for us, the younger generation? It takes away a lot of sympathy I should have for her as a human being and makes her into a utility for us to use ... but that's a whole other story. But I already was willing to like this book before I began to read it and my only Bernadette before this was the Sonnets and The Desires of Mothers to Please Others in Letters which I felt lukewarm about. There were moments where I thought the work was amazing but mostly I felt it sagged. It didn't amaze always. But the first section of this book by the time I finished this first section I was fucking blown away. The first section is this strange juggling of several dreams and the narrator's attempts at making sense of them and the way the figure of the mother haunts these dreams the way the narrator makes the mother haunt these dreams without the mother ever appearing as a figure in any of them and to watch this voice struggle with her mother and watching her mind dealing with this person in her imagination well it is so powerful that I could only put the book down and walk away and think that's what Ange admired so badly and I felt a need to apologize quietly in my heart to Bernadette. It was like if she never wrote anything worth reading after that section it didn't matter.

If this isn't a first-rate line of provisional thought correcting her false impressions, misprisons, etc., then I'll give up. Fortunately, Maggie doesn't cave, but goes on to embrace everything that's bubbling up and pertinent. Notice how Ange's thinking enters Maggie's stream of mind-changing, and this was before Ange signed on as co-administrator. Notice too the implicit critiques in passing, cannibalistic use of older poets, feeling "lukewarm" about some of Bernadette's other work, and so forth. This set of daring observations results primarily and necessarily from Maggie's urge to move from her opinions to a more fertile base for experiment, that is, to proceed by keeping her thinking truly minor enough to change.

So the table is set, candles flaming, all the atmospherics to attract Ange first and then Kathryn to weigh in and reinforce more experiment and change. What worked with Ange and Maggie's posts from 2004 and 2005 was, among other attributes, their motivation to see things like household chores and other minutiae as a bedrock of poetry. Here's Ange: "Many things impress me about My Life, but the part where Hejinian describes laying down a clean towel to walk across the freshly mopped floor really impresses me, because it says here is a woman who was fastidious about her mopping in addition to having kids and writing a mountain of books." Domestic details are on the upswing these last few months; Kathryn and Maggie have moved into a new place together; and they have become co-administrators of MA. Results from April are variegated. Kathryn complains about tight quarters, "the two of us in one room is just STUPID. it is more like a library with a bed in it than a bedroom at this point." She takes their dog "mr. poods" for a walk and winds up making a sad kid smile, buying one of his MAG / ZINES, a "local artist," according to Kathryn. These passages are inserted between Kathryn's posts on Brownson's Spirit-Rapper and an interesting research question from an e-mail: "is it possible to 'unintentionally obfuscate' something?" As if obliterating obfuscation were a theme, Maggie poses questions to Jim Behrle about his appearance on Can't Get a Date -- many domestic queries, and a couple even more personal (Kathryn was on Jim's crush list that was mentioned in the telecast) -- and then she posts full responses from Jim. Too early to know where entries from April and beyond will lead. The atmosphere is spreading. More voices are listened to. Minds are opening. Very minor, indeed.

...a poem is a way to share a secret without telling it.

-- Kate Greenstreet

Only this week Kate Greenstreet wrote me to get contact info for someone she hopes to include in her new interview project at Every Other Day (EOD). I figure Kate has mastered the arts of coincidence, writing me unknowing I'd fixed on EOD to kick off an informal survey of bloggers and blogging. The coincidence, if that is what it is, seems redoubled, since Kate has just moved her proprietorship up a peg, so to speak, introducing her interview project last week, April 26. So let's start there. Kate gave herself a task of posing naïve-seeming, incredibly open-ended questions to poets about their first books, questions like How has your first book changed your life? and Did you find that you sold many books at a reading? and Do you believe that poetry can create change in the world? She varies the questions, and succeeds in getting good responses from Shanna Compton, Andrea Baker, and Stacy Szymaszek, so far. Good responses, because you can tell the poets are glad to jump into the open-endedness and let some things out.

Kate's self-tasking here is tactical. On the face of it, Kate says she came up with the project to help her prepare for her own first book to be released this fall. It's a purposeful way to reach out to poets she likes, she knows, or she'd like to know. And while the interview format has been used in other blogging, her particular focus is new. So Kate's latest project is a socially dynamic way to put together original content that shifts the spotlight, just a bit, moving beyond the blogging ego (and its usual manifestations as craft, opinion, and learning). It's hard to say it's selfless, since Kate decides whom to interview and what to ask, but she's giving so much room for others to answer, it seems generous as well as interesting, two rare qualities hard to sustain in blogging. Kate sets up other tasks that she shares with readers. First, she fulfills the macro promise of posting every other day. She's been right on schedule, as far as I can tell, for nearly a year. Another task is a collaboration called 14 Sentences that started last February, with this prefatory note: "Max & I have been doing a diary experiment: 7 sentences a day. At the end of the first week (yesterday), we read our entries to each other, to compare what we'd taken from the days." As of the end of April there have been 10 entries and the project looks to be ongoing.

This externalizing of routines, regular postings, quotidian projects, fits with Kate's background as a painter and graphic designer. It's a secret many in art schools pick up to make stuff visible and pliable, and when you superimpose the temperament of a poet and a blogger, you begin to capture / document ebbs and flows of your varied experiments and life, not exactly diaristic, more a record-keeping of ideas and works in the making now or in the future. That said, Kate's blog is a folio of beautiful achievements to look at as well as a good read. In EOD Kate maintains a decorum between art making and the artifact that seems research-based, all the more so with these new interviews, but it's her showing us assorted methodologies "taken from the days" that is most instructive and most like poetry, sharing without the weight of too much telling.