A Little Advice from a Shrieking Personality

By Shane Neilson

Seven and a half years ago, Bookninja began. Memorably referred to as a “tree fort” by a commentator in its early days, Bookninja grew in importance with every hit, comment stream war, and media mention. We used to say that Bookninja was “shaping the literary discussion in Canada.”

Bookninja was the idea of George Murray, poet and Canadian Poetry Media Personality. Murray had published three books of poetry by the time he registered a website dedicated to sending up poetry, prose, poets, authors, agents, librarians, publicists, other bloggers, newspapers, Lisa Loeb, and Japanese martial arts. Blogs are victims to the vicissitudes of time: requiring constant content updates, they need obsessive tending. Because they’re work, writers lose interest after the intense original idea fades. But such was the genius of Bookninja: it was never about content. It was about the consumption of other content. It was about making jokes, what Murray himself termed “stand-up comedy for books.” Above all things, it was a self-promotion engine.

I sympathize with this latter motivation. The market for poetry is small. The opinion of a poet in this country doesn’t count for much, especially if that poet hasn’t won a prize. Eight years ago, before every neighbourhood tomcat in the local tree fort got the idea to start a blog about Meow Mix and his litterbox habits, it was a good idea to vicariously draw attention to oneself by running an aggregate blog that used other writers as content providers.

The blog became very popular. Murray often referred to it as one of the most popular literary Internet sites in the world. Poets, and especially the poets, flocked to it and fought amongst themselves for attention. I was one of them. Like the mall or the corner store, Bookninja was a place for the kids to hang out. It was a juvenile idea, and it had a juvy attitude.

Murray, though, became aware of the limitations of his site. After spending a few years in his rapidly corporatizing tree fort, watching hits roll in from all over the world, he had to wonder: is this all there is? Perhaps this realization came after his hundred thousandth punchline. Balloons and confetti dropped from the rafters, and Murray became aware that he had attracted an impressive volume of traffic… routed elsewhere. Readers had their daily chuckle and they moved on to the traditional outlets. It was just a blog.

Bookninja: The Magazine was born. But like infants who aren’t fed, it died.

Why?  Murray’s site was conceived in juvy. Kids don’t really think much; they just crack wise, smoke cigarettes, and stay out all night. Bookninja was about shuriken icons and hot school librarian fantasies. It was not a place meant for content because its editor didn’t know what to do with content. He created The Magazine, a hodgepodge of name authors, to literally misdirect people into thinking the blog was more than a blog. Instead of clicking on links to go to a Guardian story, people could look at an omnibus review, or an interview. It was… what everyone else was doing, what a lot of other people were doing better… namely the sites Murray was already linking to.

If Murray had continued, he might actually have stumbled upon an editorial vision. He would have improved, creating a Bookninja stamp. A bunch of authors would evoke a house style, and his content would have gotten better. But, because Murray started his site without content in mind, and only latterly realized he needed content, he let The Magazine languish. He was, in this regard, like many bloggers before and since: he lost interest.

But the jokes, they kept coming. And between those jokes, in the stage banter around those jokes, the sinister side of Bookninja was shown: Murray let it be known that he was feared by other writers, should their names appear on Bookninja in an unflattering way. He let it be known that he was regularly called on by the CBC. He repeatedly shouted out the famous writers that frequented his site. Murray let it to be known that he had power. The first Canadian Media Poetry Personality was born.

And our first such personality suffered from blogger psychosis. This is a malady that warps the minds of bloggers. It forces them to equate traffic with importance. They begin, and then are convinced of, their worth to the community, and then to the world. The example of Ron Silliman is apropos here. Consider the following quote from Poetry Magazine by Kenneth Goldsmith and decide for yourselves if it applies to Murray:

I believe that Ron’s real goal was community service, but in exchange, we had to wallow through some distasteful moments. He had no qualms about parading his stats — the many “millions” of hits and page views he was getting — stunned that so many people would actually be interested in a marginal endeavour.

Every personality has its dark side.

But the empty shell of Bookninja became a strange analogy for the real work of its creator. Content again became a problem for Murray. Inside the tree fort, a lot of industry was occurring. It took hours, I imagine half a day, to read all the sites Bookninja needed for its links. It was enormous work. (The stories Murray linked to were often not the most important “literary matters of the day,” but rather were the ones that gave him the most amusing quips. Like all good stand up writers, Murray started the morning with the newspapers.)

The Silliman piece from Poetry Magazine is again eerily similar. Here’s another excerpt:

As I said in my previous post, a poet’s trajectory is a long, slow, roll and this was an eight-year chapter in what already amounts to a decades-long career for Silliman. While it won’t be a blip, it’ll be a long time before we start to think of him first and foremost as a poet. Even he seems to acknowledge this. In his farewell post, he discussed his recent activities which include a conference devoted to his work, various readings, archival work, and festivals, declaring, ‘This is an intensive a period given over to the public side of my writing as I’ve had in years, literally, and I expect to end up quite winded by the process.’

The problem for Bookninja was always content: over the lifespan of the blog, Murray was supposed to be a poet. If he wasn’t producing poetry, then the purpose of Bookninja was moot: there are no awards (The Silly Shuriken?) handed out to a blog’s kneeslapper magnitude. Bookninja had to be conducted parallel to the writing and publishing of poetry. Murray attended parties as a Bookninja correspondent but wasn’t there as recipient. The former was designed to facilitate the latter.

All the time spent online, linking to journalism pieces he hadn’t written, then crafting satirical zingers, was time spent not writing poetry. Murray did release a book during the Bookninja era—I think it is his best, one that I’d earnestly nominate as our best—but it’s hard not to conclude that he wrote far less than he otherwise could have. Perhaps more importantly, Murray’s book didn’t win any awards.

The content of Murray’s own writing had to be upgraded beyond the periodic aesthetic upgrades to his site. Bookninja then began a prolonged period of decline. It’s possible that Murray shopped the site around. He then made a call for someone to take over from him as proprietor of Bookninja, but it had the ring of awkwardness that’s trademarked blogger psychosis: Murray would let someone else do all the work for him, an editor/slave, but he would remain executive producer of the site, a Canadian Poetry Lorne Michaels.

Bookninja died.

But fear not! The Canadian Poetry Media Personality has another idea.

It involves… the Internet. It is… a blog. It will be about… poetry. It will publish… poems.

Newpoetry.ca went live on April 5, 2011. It stemmed from, not coincidentally, the most contentious issue involving Canadian poetry over the past few years, an issue Murray profited from on Bookninja. Murray watched the various factions and groups and schools of poetry engaged in warfare in Canada, and realized that he would be a genius if he could claim he brought peace to the Internet by bringing all walks of poetry under one umbrella. Murray took something all the poets cared about, which is how much they hated and often misunderstood each other, and he decided he’d knock their heads together under one roof. It would get him a lot of attention— indeed, it already had. Murray would solve the problem of content by actually producing something with content.

How we start a venture is critically important for the success of the venture. I can imagine the jokes Murray himself would have written should someone other than this country’s Canadian Media Poetry Personality created newpoetry.ca. Murray’s first post, on what is a blog, about poetry, is a “manifesto.” It’s quite short, as manifestoes go, and he’s already backtracked from it, promising… more substantive… content in a future editorial. But in this manifesto, Murray has listed a number of writers that have agreed to join ol’ CPMP in his quest to diplomatically unite all the poets in Canada. These writers are all name writers. This fact is fodder for a Bookninja-esque joke, something beginning with the premise that all Murray ever really cared about—like most poets—was making a name for himself, and now he’s using the names of those more prominent than himself to make a name for himself.

Newpoetry.ca has been covered… by the Internet. A number of bloggers have announced their praise and undying loyalty, including one who referred to the “shrieking personalities” who have been heretofore distorting discussions of Canadian poetry. This is rich in that the Canadian Poetry Media Personality, a paid personality himself, was one who benefited from those same personalities playing an intrinsic role on early Bookninja, especially in the comment streams. (Rich too because the aggrieved blogger shouldn’t be able to hear by now, having shrieked himself deaf long ago.)

The National Post has also covered the “story.” The story of a blog which, as yet, has no content. In this interview with Murray, the Canadian Poetry Media Personality admits that he, thus far, has no content. He’s not sure what direction the site will go in. He has no goal thus far. In my experience, not having a goal as an editor and publisher is a death knell for the enterprise.

At the time I write this, Murray has made another post. In it, he lists the media that have covered his new venture. The goal is then, of course, more coverage! Most entertaining of all these outlet links, he lists the National Post site on which newpoetry.ca’s heralded non-debut is noted as being published also in the “print version” of the paper.

Newpoetry.ca is a blog. And Murray is only getting this attention because of the traffic he got from his previous blog. Also because of the great fights had on the Internet over the years by the people he’s aiming his new blog at. And he’s getting validation from the fact that he’s appearing in the print version of the paper. (Best of all, the bio in the National Post story lists one of Murray’s accomplishments as contributing editor at Canadian Notes and Queries, a publication for which he has never contributed a single thing.)

Social media has not been kind to the Canadian Media Poetry Personality. A lot of poets have enthusiastically saluted him with “likes” to his constant updates on how many hits his new site has garnered (old habits die hard). Quite a few have written him to say that they’d gladly like to be a part of his venture. But… shrieking personalities die hard too. Sina Queyras was the only poet who refused Murray’s invitation to be on the masthead of newpoetry.ca. She waited for a few days after the site’s launch, and then she posted an open letter on Facebook which criticized Murray… for stealing her idea.

Queyras is also an interesting case. She’s also a blogger (Lemon Hound) but her particular brand of blogger psychosis is in aggressive victimhood that conducts periodic facelifts by deleting and editing compromising postings. She is an avant garde poet, but for the past year or so she’s been featuring the work and the writings and criticism of a variety of poets and poetic styles on her blog. It might be fair to say that Queyras brought peace to the Internet first, and if you read her letter, you might nominate her for a Nobel Peace Prize to boot. But Queyras brought peace by becoming positively allergic to criticism. She disabled the comment streams on her blog because she was coming under fire (don’t look for this paragraph on her blog— it’s not there anymore):

The comments feature on this blog has been turned off for the moment. Partly this is because of the holidays and a need to *not* be checking in so often, but also because LH is not convinced that comments streams are doing much to foster discussion.

Discussion, of course, can only be that which is approved by her Houndness. The self-contradiction is incredible, for at the time she was a vigorous comment stream swimmer on other blogs. And so, Queyras did indeed bring some peace to the Internet. Because she stifled the debate that was occurring between her side and the “shrieking personalities” always known to opposing sides as the other side.

Murray wrote back to Queyras. Fatally. Instead of taking all the time in the world, which is the time he has, because he has yet to publish anything important, Murray wrote back within a few hours to mollify Queyras and tell her that she was indeed important. Rather than point out, truly, that Queyras was a reason why Murray felt the urge to create the domain name, Murray capitulated. And, once given her due, Queyras did what she was best at. She closed the comment stream on the Open Letter.

A little advice from a screaming personality to the Canadian Poetry Media Personality on how to actually create a good issue (i.e., have good content): spend time on it. Solicit the best people you know (and if you’re really smart, those you don’t.) Add to what you get. Subtract from it. Show it to people who’ve proven themselves to be smart. Release your issue with the highest of hopes. And then hope that the bloggers link to your site, and comment about your site, and that the national newspapers come calling about what you’ve actually done, as opposed to what you intend on doing.

Newpoetry.ca may be a success, it may break down every sad silo in the poetry world. At the time of writing, submissions close for the first issue on June 1 (no word on when the best of poetry will be unveiled).

But content is, historically, not Murray’s strength.  In trying to be all things to all people, by trying to provide a cross-section of all styles and methods, he’ll likely have a diluted product that won’t live up to the expectations he’s created with the national media attention. Eclectic journals aren’t popular, because consumers of content know what they tend to like. Which is content limited to what they like. And, with reference to like, my apologies to Facebook. My apologies to the Internet.