I'm devoting the rest of this entry to musing about literary popularity. I started thinking, yet again, about my own absence of it yesterday, after finishing my 86th column for Small Press Review. I'm sure Len Fulton, editor and publisher of that magazine, keeps me on only because he feels an obligation to cover visual poetry. I'm convinced almost no one reads the column. If more than a dozen or so of the several thousand who read the magazine do, why does this blog only draw ten or twenty readers?

Okay, I do realize that many SPR readers may skim or even attentively read my column but aren't interested enough in what it covers to come here. A fair number many not be connected to the Internet. Still, that's not flattering to my column. If I were any kind of writer, people reading my column should want to read more of me here--and I do advertize my blog in my column from time to time. In fact, I bring it up again in the column I've just written.

Frankly, I can't understand it. I can't understand why my subject should not be interesting to any general reader. Granted, it's a specialty of mine, so I have a strong positive bias toward it. Still, words are universal, and many people are serious readers. Why shouldn't I have a mere ten thousand readers, then? One-thousandth of the number of serious, adventurous readers in America, if we consider one out of thirty Americans a serious adventurous reader. Surely they cannot be less common than that!

Maybe I'm a lousy writer. It's hard for me to accept the possibility, but . . . I do know that many people find me a difficult writer tackling difficult subject matter. Usually, I feel I'm going out of my way to be accessible. I think I know when I'm off on a tangent few will be able to keep up with me on--because into esoterica, with what I deem flash, freshness and depth, but is too idiosyncratic for others. And I think of William F. Buckley, Jr.'s columns which were ridiculed for their long words, but seemed to me models of clarity (whether I agreed or disagreed with them).

I suppose if I wrote more about famous poets, I'd build an audience. I note that my most-visited blog entry this past month or so was the one in which I mentioned that I'd gotten a piece into an anthology Rita Dove had also gotten one into. Her name, I'm sure, was responsible for most of the extra readers. No one interested in her work would be likely to become a reader of this blog. But I'd rather have my few readers than some significantly larger number who were fans of poets like Rita Dove. Nothing wrong with being a fan of hers, but there are many locations one can go to, to read about her. And I certainly have nothing new to say about her work, or that of any other famous American poet. Unfortunately for my popularity as a commentator on poetry, I regard it my duty to focus on the severely under-recognized, and do poetics rather than poetry journalism, by which I mean do little more than make announcements of new poetry books and readings (although I admit to doing that, too, here, as with Mike Cannell's blog).

My books generate next to no interest, too. I hoped they'd get a bit of word-of-mouth, but none has. Someday, maybe someone will explain it all to me. In the meantime, I will count my blessings: the fact that I live in so extraordinarily affluent a society that I can do as much as I am as a literateur without starving, and that I at least have YOU, my dear readers!