My mother sent it to me in a shoebox--when it fit inside a shoebox--when I lived in Ithaca. It thrives. I do nothing and it thrives. She dug it out of her front yard from a patch of it growing beneath the fig tree, wrapped it in a paper towel, taped the box closed, addressed it from Texas to New York and put it in the mail. I unwrapped it in my kitchen and put it in a pot. I don't think you can do that sort of thing unless you have vegetable love touch. I don't mean green thumb. I mean medicine woman growing her daughter's garden: wherever she goes there is aloe from home. It has nearly outgrown the dining room table.

***

Thank you Anne Boyer, you of the most exquisite Odalisqued--

"When Teicher argues that Josh’s blog is the most prominent, and its prominence explains the exclusion of women in his article, he is also arguing that the sexism lies in “an unequal distribution of influence of the blogosphere”, not in his choice of focus. I do not buy it. I do not think blogs even function in terms of influence hierarchies; I think they are mostly a collaborative project, a use of social software to build community – not a set of individual, isolated platforms that can be ranked according to dominance..."

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And Nada:

"NOT TO BE PETULANT OR ANYTHING, but...."

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And Josh:

"it may be the women who are pushing most insistently against the residual "print-think" that I would be the first to admit has a hold on my consciousness: bloggers like Anne, Robin, Alli, and many if not most of the writers linked to at ~*~W_O_M_B~*~ are taking fuller advantage of the medium's polyphonic possibilities than male bloggers like myself whose practice is easier to recognize from the perspective of print culture."

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And Jordan:

"-- I wish for his sake it wasn't the big story of 2003, and I also wish he hadn't pissed off half the population."

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And Reb:

"And on a slightly different note, are blog stats the new penis size?"

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And Shanna:

"Pointing to another article in the same issue that does feature a woman (who is also not participating in the online scene which the article in question characterizes as the new vital space) is lame. And implying including a woman poet-blogger would be taking the 'opportunity to portray the blogosphere as a space for dialogue on all sorts of issues between and about women and men in poetry and literary culture in general, to show that men and women are equal contributors to the blog scene,' is way lame."

***

And Tony:

"His is a positive outlook that it is the abundance of a feminine tendency and the narrowness of a masculine one that results in the gendering in the PW article. But a gendering of tendencies--does that ever go well?

What I mean: the positive argument could be made the flip-side of an argument that I could imagine certain commentors in Silliman's blog might make, "Well, ladies, if you'd dust off your criticism chops and get down to some real poetry blogging, then you'd get included in the conversation." The fault doesn't lay with the articles author, or notions of legitimacy, etc., but with the women bloggers: if more of you blogged the way I think you should, I'd recognize it."

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And Jessica quoting Carroll to weigh in on girls being "more visual":

"'and what is the use of a book', thought Alice, 'without pictures or conversations?'"

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And Stephanie:

"Because I have a lot of questions, like is it only female bloggers, or female writers in general who are ‘more visual’? Is ‘visual’ really code for ‘photography’? Or do female bloggers interact more with visual culture in general, i.e. advertising, film? Or with the visual arts? Are there more female bloggers who are also visual artists? Or is the The Image central to their writing? Do they make more collages than men? Or perhaps it refers to higher design and production values? Do lady bloggers have prettier blogs in general?"

***

And Seth?

"Jessica Smith is a virulent and hateful chauvinist, as her comments on her site attest, and I don't treat with those--ever--male or female. Since I've been blogging, roughly 50,000 unique visitors have visited my blog, and not one has accused me of "seeking a safe space to insult women." That you have said so, in the act of fascistically deleting posts on your blog, disgraces you. You should be ashamed of yourself, and the women you claim to so compassionately defend should be ashamed of you, too. I bet they are, whether they'll admit it publicly or not."

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And Craig:

"I was trying to offer the best representation of the blogging scene I could given my limitations—some of which are personal (my knowledge, perspective, biases, preferences) and some of which are imposed from outside (word count, etc.)--and I had criteria for choosing who and what to write about--one of which was certainly the prominence of a particular blog or web (as I understood it), and another of which was figuring out how to tell the story so it could be understood by the audience I felt I was writing for. This wasn't the conversation I thought the piece would spark, but it's important that it did—the issue and feelings that provoked this response were out there, and if my article brought them to the fore, I’m glad the blogosphere provides a place for those thoughts to be heard. I certainly expected to be criticized."

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And Jim:

"Girls blog? EW!!"

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