I'm in Florida, for the second time in my life, to attend and help give a presentation at a User's Group meeting for TrackEye software from Image Systems in Sweden. Tonight I looked up Jonathan Mayhew's Bemsha Swing to read reports of David Shapiro's vist to Kansas. I'd expressed admiration for Shapiro's poetry in a comment at Mayhew's blog, but expressed doubt—well, I wrote he was clueless—about Shapiro's understanding of metrical poetry, and then corrected myself as a result of a short exchange between myself and Mayhew, admitting that my doubts sprang from off-the-cuff and perhaps polemical remarks Shapiro had made at a reading a few years ago, and that I really didn't know what Shapiro currently understood about metrical poetry. Now Mayhew has disappeared the post and the commment exchange.
It's his blog. He can do what he likes. But fuck him. I'm not generally one for metablogging, but one of the principal virtues of the form is as a record of evolving understanding, and serious bloggers generally correct without erasing mistakes they've made, and only delete blatant spam or unwarranted personal attacks, even then marking the deletion in some way. This isn't the first time Mayhew has chosen to lie by altering the history of his blog. Fuck him. He's a lousy poet and an occasionally entertaining, occasionally enlightening blogger who can't be trusted.
Be assured, Dr. Mayhew, that if you restore the post and consequent comment exchange, or even state unequivocally that they were deleted in error, I'll retract every word of this without deleting it, and offer my sincerest apology.
11:59:29 PM 
|
|
