This certainly is a different kind of format for someone used to the hubbub of message boards. It's still and solitary--which seems appropriate for a poet; but it is a change. The 3 message boards I've frequented over the years were loud, busy, contentious places, and that made them both interesting and annoying. The chief problem with them, for me anyway, is that an awful lot of people like to post on poetry message boards who have no interest in (let alone skill at) poetry. They just want to be noticed, and they don't care what they say, if only it garners them a little attention. At least that's not a problem here, and if it turns out to be, I see I've been equipped with a Delete button. How convenient.
Although I was going to remark that I don't know what it is about poetry boards that attracts so many trolls, so many half-baked half-wits, clamoring to be noticed and stroked--is it that poetry still has lingering trappings of prestige, vestigial survivals from archaic times?--the truth is that I'm not familiar with other sorts of message boards. For all I know, they have exactly the same problems. Maybe there are Quilting Trolls and Scrapbooking Trolls and Duckpin Bowling Trolls who haunt, menace, and disrupt their respective venues. I don't know.
But it is nice and quiet here.
RHE
