October 17, 2007 4:15 PM Update – or confession – time: If I’ve been away from here for several weeks now, this is partly due to my new interest in (some of you guessed it) the Facebook. Some of you might even have been able to predict it: I believe it is the evolution of my thinking about the socal groundedness of poetry that draws me to – not Facebook as such, but the new realities of what has come to be known as social media. Let’s face it: they are here to stay, and are already – and rapidly – changing everything we used to know about (the end of) writing, identity, authorship, ideology, in short: poetry and poetics. I will have reasons (and hopefully time) to come back to all this, for now, suffice it to paraphraze my friend Kenny: I used to be a writer, then I became a text processor. Then I realized I could leave the processing out – for most purposies, simple pasting was more efficent, and creative. Now pasting itself is quickly becoming obsolent: we are entering the time of reading-as-clicking-as-writing. As for poetry, it’s not – as ever – exactly a question of “using” the (once again) new possibilities the new realities offer for its “advancement” (these are tremendous: but there is no such “thing” as poetry): the challenge is to explore the (new) poetry of those more than real realities (as opposed to the old, virtual ones). For me, it’s going to equal, among other things, a restructuring of my entire web “presence”, soon. Meanwhile, you may always “add me as friend” on Facebook at http://profile.to/leevilehto.
Leevi Lehto