30 October 1997: A couple of nights ago I submitted Comprepoetica to Alta Vista for listing and it was supposedly accepted. I was told it would take a few days for people to be able to find it through Alta Vista, though. I just tried Alta Vista and got no matches. Meanwhile, I've futzed around a little with the colors at the Comprepoetica home page, and put in margins, thanks to some code Ted Warnell sent me. He had gotten in touch with me about the site Damian Lopes has for my Runaway Spoon Press catalogue, which he had linked to, and I persuaded him to link to Comprepoetica, as well. No reply yet from Poets & Writers. The counter is up to 265. I believe more visits have been made to the site by people other than I than by me. I have 18 bios stored now--but probably half need processing that I seem too lazy to do.

I just thought of something my site could use: a search engine that would search only it.

1 November 1997: Interesting: the site has been officially open twenty days now and it now has twenty bios of poets. That's encouraging; also a little frightening. What if Comprepoetica becomes popular?! The counter says 278 (It's around 6 P.M.)

2 November 1997: Comprepoetica has now been officially open for three weeks and has accumulated 21 bios, most of them hurriedly and only semi-adequately rendered readable. Today I added the first bio of a critic, Michel Delville's. The counter reads 287. I continue to do housekeeping, and make small improvements. Nothing exciting is going on, though. I don't expect to make any further entries to this log for a while.

22 November 1997: Yesterday GeoCities informed me that Comprepoetica had 77 official visits during the first half of the month, and its companion, the site devoted to biographies of poets, had 41. Better that 2 and 1 per day, which is pretty good, I think. It now reads 371. I now have 29 biographies stored, a few of which I still have to process. The site no longer seems very yowie to me but I think it's progressing well. The counter went defunct for a while since I last made an entry here. I had to push it up from 9 or so to what I thought it ought to be be constantly reloading the home page, each reload making the counter add one to its total. I haven't been doing much work at the site, but did format, boldface, italicize, etc., the outline of my literary taxonomy that I have in the file for the terminological part of the dictionary. A few suggestions for new schools came in: "parataxis," "alterity" and "aleatory." The latter might be a sub-school. In my formal taxonomy, it would be a technique only, since it can lead to any number of different kinds of poems, depending on the kind of set-up a given poet chooses to hold the results of his chance-generated operations, whatever they are. "Alterity" sounds like my "otherstream," an umbrella term I'd use to classify a wide variety of schools under, and "parataxis" is a synonym for "jump-cut," which is already on my list. This set of responses, which I appreciate, came in anonymously, which I don't, because it prevents me from finding out more, if necessary.

27 November 1997: I haven't been doing much here at Comprepoetica for a while. The site continues not to get many visits, but the counter has reached 400. I now have 31 bios and 19 samples of poetry available. A day or two ago I put margins into the bio files; I'd forgotten about them when I put margins into the other Comprepoetica files. They look much nicer now. I still need to fix up several of them that are still just raw data. I'm awfully lazy, though.
A month has now passed since I e.mailed Poets & Writers about my site, by the way. I've gotten no reply.

3 December 1997: the counter now reads 441. I've added another essay about my taxonomy to Comprepoetica but not yet made it accessible to visitors. I first want to touch it up. I e.mailed Poets & Writers a second time, by the way, but haven't heard back. I'll try them one more time before I write them off as estabniks. (Frankly, if they were really interested in the advancement of poetry, I wouldn't have had to write them about my site; they would have been aware of it.)

5 December 1997, 6 AM: traffic is lessening at Comprepoetica. The counter reads just 449 and the latest report from GeoCities is that the site had only 61 visits during the second half of November; the biographical section had 55. Meanwhile, I e.mailed my request for a little publicity to Poets & Writers again yesterday. Little else is going on.

7 January 1998, 5 PM: it's been over a month since I made an entry here, so I guess I ought to make one. Little to say, though. The Comprepoetica visit-counter reads 595. I just added a very short biography to my bio section to bring the count there to 43. I haven't been doing much to/with the site lately. I was quite sick for a couple of weeks with the flu and who knows what else. Not sure whether I'm over it yet or not, but am not up to trying to revive Comprepoetica right now. I'm not feeling too yowie about it but if my halth gets better, I'm sure I'll regain at least some of my initial enthusiasm--and be more aggressive about getting bios. I never heard back from Poets & Writers, incidentally. Not even a polite, sorry, can't do anything for you. But they're in an entirely different world from me.

29 January 1998: It would appear that visits are averaging about 4 a day now--not much. The counter now reads 635. The latest report from GeoCities, which was for 17 December to 15 January, says that the site had 132 "qualified visits" (which excludes extra visits close together from the same address). Only one has sent me data for a bio in the past couple of weeks. I'm getting discouraged.

9 February 1998: The counter is only up to 655 now, down to two visits a day. And I've only gotten one new bio, for Ken Brandon, which I hope to put up tonight. Meanwhile, a medical problem has struck me, so I might not be too involved with this site for a while. Apologies to anyone I therefore let down in anyway.

19 April 1998: Nothing new to report except that the past two notes from GeoCities telling me how many visits the site has gotten during March said there have been 57, or just under two-a-day. The site counter reads 788. I just recently got a new bio. I hope to put it up today.

On another front, my medical problem (prostate cancer) continues but is under treatment. The prognosis is good. Meanwhile, yesterday I found out one of my two cats has terminal cancer. I begin to wonder if anything in my life will go right again. I will try to keep this site going nonetheless.

20 September 1998: A long hiatus. Things are going better now. I still miss my cat, but radiation treatments and seed implants seem to have knocked out my prostate cancer. I did a lot of traveling over the summer, from which I'm only now starting to recover--as I try to re-adjust to my return to substitute teaching at one of the local high schools. I had a bio to add to the site, which I did earlier; I also updated a bio at the request of one of the Comprepoetica biographees. Meanwhile, I got a letter from someone who put no e.mail address with it. He suggested I add the term, "isotope," to mean "an anagrammatical form, each line of which uses only the sixteen letters of a 4x4 word square." Problems: the term is already associated with chemistry, and I can't see how its use there is at all similar to the poetics use described in my correspondent's letter. The kind of poem he describes sounds rather obscure, too. But I'd like to discuss the term further if my correspondent will get back to me. I hope to keep up with this site better in the future, but probably won't do too well for several months. I hope people will send in biographical material and anything else they think might fit in with the rest of this site, anyway.

Further note: I just realized that Comprepoetica will have its first birthday in about three weeks. The visit count stands at 1058, or approximately three visits-a-day. It had gotten down to barely one a day during the summer, but jumped back to nearly three-a-day recently--probably because Daniel Zimmerman was kind enough to recommend it to a class he's teaching.

16 January 1999: Nothing's been happening here for quite a while. Visits are down to about one a day. I recently got an interesting suggestion for a school: "faxomaticism"--for poets who practice "fax interupted and electronically disturbed transmissions." Seems to me it's a poetics term but too narrow to name a school with. At most it would be a sub-school of a fax-poetry school. "Verbo-Visual Poetry" is another recently-arrived suggested term but not too useful, I'm afraid, since we already have visual poetry, which--as poetry--is already verbal. On the other hand, since there are those arguing for averbal visual poetry, perhaps "verbo-visual" would work for visual poetry that is verbal, and "averbo-visual poetry" for visual poetry that is not. In any event, I welcome such suggestions. I do not welcome such sludge as the following, which I also received fairly recently--as a "poetics term":

the box once upon a time in the land hush-a-by they came across curious sort of box it was bound by chains and locked by locks and labled "kindley do not touch its war"

the children understood the children happend to be good and were just as good around the the time of war they never tried to

In some other context I would take this as a mildly amusing bit of sentimentality, but here it seems some sort of ignorant dig at the value of defining things--boxing them, that is--and hinting that such a practice leads to war. Or maybe I'm reading too much into an innocent if confused posting.

Now for an announcement. In hopes of reviving Comprepoetica, I've decided to start regularly posting reviews of poetry collections, and individual poems--as well as poetics/poetry-related essays of the sort already at my site. I hope to have the first one up sometime in February. So, if you have anything you want me to consider--about ANY KIND OF POETRY, e.mail it to me--with, please, a return address, so I can get back to you about it. Snail-mail submissions will be okay, too, though it may be a long time before I can deal with one. My intention is have a series of weekly posts containing only posts I like (which will depend mainly on their skill at close-reading) or my own (since I doubt that I'll be getting submissions from too many others for a while). But I will also archive unused submissions--so long as I have space to do so. I plan to have two feedback files available, too--one for what I consider sensible & coherent responses to posted essays, and one for the rest. I hope also to start posting more of my own published essays by themselves--with essays from others, published or unpublished, if anyone will send them to me.

10 February 1999: the latest word is that visits are up at Comprepoetica from less than 30 per half-month to 80, according to the last count. But my many visits backstage to do housekeeping may be getting counted, so I'm not sure if the site is beginning to win back interest. In any event, I've decided to slaim that Comprepoetica had gotten 1492 visits by 2 February, my birthday. The count today was 1529. Jack Foley's essay, the first--and so far only--one at the Variably-Authored Essay Section has so far drawn 17 visits; my essay section has gotten 30. No one has responded to anything by e.mail for quite a while.

15 February 1999: According to my counter, visits to Comprepoetica are now up to 1638, which means they've been up to 20-a-say for the past five days. That seems unlikely. Probably my fussing around backstage is adding to the count in some manner. Much of the fussing was over two new reviews, one by Ralph La Charity now viewable, and one by Charles Potts that I haven't made accessible to viewers yet. So I now have three critics contributing, which is a relief. I don't want the site to be all Me. A lot of it will stay Me, though: I've just put in a section to be devoted to my columns from Small Press Review. Bios are starting to trickle back in, too. The two latest are from Bobbie West and Tim Gilbert. I also got some suggested terms for use in the Comprepoetica Dictionary (if there ever is one): "visual poetry," which I already have, and "extended metaphor" and "personification," which I would have gotten around to adding. The first reason someone writes poetry that's not on my list came in a few days ago, too: "I write poetry only when i can't sleep at night without writing it." Frankly, I consider this a frivolous reason and don't think I'll be adding it to my list. On the other hand, the idea of poetry as a mental exercise makes sense. I think one of my reasons already on the list is too close to that for me to add it, though. . . .

Things do seem to be looking up here.

16 February 1999: the visits counter now says 1663. Some of those are mine, and some Karl Kempton checking the essay of his that I put up, and which has a bunch of mistakes I hope soon to correct. Still, the site continues to be pretty active.

I just finished getting the last of the recent three new bios right. Its subject, David Kopaska-Merkel suggested three new questions for the Comprepoetica Survey, which I'vejust added to it, along with an additional related question I thought of. His three questions: "Why do you write poetry?" "When did you start writing poetry?" "Why do you read poetry?" I added, "Why did you start writing poetry?"

8 April 1999: I have just discovered I'm out of room, so there will have to be a part two to this sitelog. Phooey.