We've been talking about Wikipedia entries over on the Poem forum and I thought it might be useful to raise the issue here. Don't know if anyone here ever has any truck with Wikipedia but it's a place where you can look people up - poets, writers, artists, politicians, celebrities etc - plus, of course, things or topics - particular wars, concepts like justice or homosexuality, films, books, historical events etc.

Anyway, it's not considered the done thing to post up your own entries on Wikipedia if you've done anything note-worthy. Which seems fair enough.

But you can surely get friends to post entries for you. Otherwise, unless you're hugely well-known with works on scholarship on you, how can you be sure you'll get an entry at all or that you'll have an entry that fairly reflects your personal history and achievements?

I got a close relative to post my entry up and have even tweaked it myself on occasion, to add new facts - like the publication of Boudicca & Co last month, for example. I don't see how else the system can work, except, as I said, for people of the same statue as Seamus Heaney. And how many of us are that well-known? If everyone was too coy about posting entries connected to their own successes or achievements or scholarship, or felt 'someone else will do that', Wikipedia would not exist except as a very narrow and incomplete reflection of our age.

The who's who on Wikipedia can put one to sleep Jane, but how we disseminate the veracity of online information will astir one who thinks this debate a more rewarding path to enquire down in search for the guff which guides one's learning to a poetic understanding we publicly espouse and occassionally joust with others about in our war for a literate aristocracy.

When we first start out the net is a daunting place and we end up on wild goose chases, unable to find our needles of proof in the search through a haystack of info and the journey on my path as a serious bore seems to be a written exercise to acquire the skill of appraising the accuracy of info in print in order to produce a quality product myself. I will try to formulate a point for discussion and post it up.

I have a load of ideas on this general topic of publicity and net publishing and tried to coax them out to coherency for an hour or two as I wrote this, but was unable to get beyond what's below.

~

I always suspected this supposed literary decorum of not posting up entries about oneself on Wikipidea to be totally fallacious and that throughout our class system those in the ranks - from naive conscript to the most seasoned voluntary campaigner collapsing under the weight of titles, ribbon and brass their career has brought – are effectively controlling what blurbs about them get posted there anyway, as you confirm here.

Few compotent writers have a problem managing their own publicity and playing puppet master to a willing cohort who they'll assist with the text and who'll physically click the mouse and upoload it to keep the whole business technically straight, as these things go two way. Writer A talks up Writer B and vice versa. This is the essence of a professional relationship, which we all know extends to even talking up weaker works of colleagues which we don’t rate.

As an unaligned radical from the lower orders of literate society with a very minor talent for writing, two basic scraps of learning I’ve picked up since finishing my training are, that the role of a professional poet demands we publicise our career using all available ploys and, that Wikipidea has no bar on what biographical entries can be posted up, which – I believe – is only right.

A plumber from Bolton called Jack Smith could be in there if he wanted, and I suspect this sort of fluff is already on there and am in no doubt that if it is not, will soon appear as the net meshes deeper into quotidian life and the democracy of the it widens to include "non-celebrities" who - unlike us - suffer from a poverty of excitement in their lives and decide to broadcast their status as a human being wishing to connect with others, however un-poetic their printed gift be.

It may even get to the point where it is considered more prestigious not to have an entry in Wikipidea. You may laugh, but I have witnessed the very same phenomena with cell phones. 15 years ago only wealthy citizens had one and now all do, except me. I have never had one and so have remained detached and assessed their impact at a greater remove than most.

Now when I say I don't have a phone some people think I am lying, as it has seeped into the pysche that everyone must have one to such a degree that a collective delusion is in danger of breaking out, as though they are organic and not plastic.

Wikipidea's evolution has been interesting to follow as it has mushroomed to become the number one point of entry for factual data, with a central ethos of being a “free content encyclopaedia” and it seems probable that it will become the post-modern equivalent of the Library of Alexandria and the primary portal for information seekers.

Wikipidea was launched on 15 January 2001 by Jimmy Wales - 13 days after I first began writing - and Jim was the lad-mag'ish bloke who founded the search portal called Bomis in 1996, which creates and hosts web-rings around popular search terms categorized broadly as "Babes", "Entertainment", "Sports", "Adult", "Other" and "Science fiction". The "Adult", "Babes" and "Entertainment" categories are the most frequently updated and the most popular.

Ovid Yeats Bio Wikipedia

Only joking, it's Jimmy Wales.

I would just like to stress that the above post is entirely Ovid Yeats' opinion and is in no way connected to me or anyone else on this poetry forum!

Here's a quote from the Jimmy Wales Wikipedia entry:

" ... Wales apologized for editing his own biography (a practice generally frowned on at Wikipedia). Wales said in the Wired interview, "People shouldn't do it, including me. I wish I hadn't done it." ... "

You see? Even the best people do it ...

The website, as linked to above by Ovid, is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Wales

I've heard the opinion elsewhere that self-publicising is somehow grubby and embarrassing. But I don't see why. The old saying goes, blow your own trumpet, no one else will blow it for you. You can't sell something if no one knows it exists. And while those poets lucky enough to be published by really big publishers like Faber or Cape or Picador can no doubt afford to lie back and think of the royalties, the rest of us mortals have to make a push ourselves if people are to know our work exists and is available to buy. There's nothing grubby about making a living. That sort of attitude is Victorian and, quite frankly, something poets lucky enough not to need to self-publicise ought to be ashamed of.

I think all practicing poetic mind's suffer ridiculously disingenuous kamakazi attacks in print by ego mangled crazies and amatuer bullies when plying one's personae in socially linquistic commerce with the lightweight old school print-centric professional successfully practicing hari kari at the bland edge of internet in rigged salons of cosy pose-y literature - and one is forced into hatcheting the seriously tedious offender silent with a remote chop from the cosmic sword, to samurai them out now and again with a Yeatsean trick, chill a few cod socialist gobs shut for the good god Ogma Jane, particularly now in the age of democratic public broadcasting of information, propoganda or art, much of which is propoganda or information and on the odd occassion is art.

The first one in its most basic formula is unambiguous - a timetable at the bus stop - and segues into the second as the nature and purpose of the information changes and more skill is exerted on the intention and dissemination of the text - sliding up the slope of eloquence slip by ever more graceful slip until we no longer stumble through the corridors of composition on a dimly voltaged intellect, yacking of plaudits, prizes and titles; the imprecise gung ho of our utterance unable to articulate with exactness the thing we long is revealed to us by the elemental force we are yet to fully experience or entirely know - but we come to purport firm, floating, sure and comporting devoid of critically false doctrinaire and propoganda, shed when we cease hacking and collapse through the final doorway of departure and surrender to our course of total affirmation and belief in one's eye to accurately judge the wattage of art in others, with the only reliable rule one has - self made and drawn by us in our capacity as legislators presenting the exact poetic reality of one's world, so that our colleagues in showbiz will quanitify the gravitas and giggles in an intentional and measured address we voice to fellows at the front fighting for peace and love, by trenchiing out online one's mind to fellow nutters - bouyant and trafficking proof in the realm of our poetry.

This is all there is says Seamus in his essay explaining what poetry is and how it works in a practitioner's life. It is a simple system once learnt after great difficulty and practiced by only the most commited personell in - what the Ireland Professor of Poetry Paul Durcan calls - a "mystic trade." And he should know, because he's the main titled man who is not an unknowledgable idiot, but an arch oollamh of the highest order who weaves the incoherent jumble of his life to a capacity few in performance or print can touch or top.

I think what's happening with Wikipidea is that it's fast becoming the biggest repository of information ever and first port of enquiry for the curious, but the poetic coherency of our writing is the final arbiter of one's artistic validity in the readers mind - I believe - as there is a post-modern mushroom cloud of schools and ideas claiming ever more diffuse and impenitrable hegemonies of a critical route to the real thing. Our job - I suspect - is the unique dig for enlightenment with a spade of intellect which prints the blueprint of one's verse correctly poetic, which roots to a guaranteed source of the logical faith in a straight art - literally dan direach - which is the most difficult and skillfull written meter of the bardic tradition. You had to be constantly at it for a fair few years before the cauldron of motion spun up the incline of the wisdom pot to a minimum capacity for dabbling in that caper.

This form has never been surpassed in metrical complexity as it was written with a forensic attention to intricate mathmatical detail only the quantum linguist can innovate with and which many - if not most - in the entertainment business today are comletely unaware even existed, which makes a full engagement on the topic with others almost impossible, as the ones who can chat knowingly are mainly scholars of ancient history, whose knowledge on this topic took - pre web - a lifetime to accumulate and they aren't the types with much spare time to teach for free vast bunches of dreamers after the real gen on a spring which printed poetry for over 1200 years, until only a few hundred ago and still trickles enough for the seer to coherently oracle a route to its source and draw from that well of poetic knowledge, in a way which is impossible for the English language practitioners whose god-head poetic pumps only mediterranean metrics of antiquity to discern or do - as the living spark of greco-roman diddlee dee was long quenched when English langauge verse began to be practiced by more than a handful of gifted hobbyists like Chaucer.

The one sensible native path to a poetic knowledge paved in the sniff of truth is just too difficult and boring for most amatuer bores to contemplate pursuing with any real intellectual effort or commitment, apart from the few who ignore the fallicious fantasy and propoganda of brainwashed greco-roman-centrics and get to know the logical power of its guiltless garden of eden myth of nine hazel instead of an apple tree, no reptilliean anti-christ whispering armageddon or eternal spiritual torture by burning, a total absence of Adam and a much more sophisticated Eve, in the form of Fin, who finds Nirvanic wisdom in a Salmon rather than terminal depression and eternal shame in a grannie smith.

One where the fruit of enlightenment is a force for potential good, if the human protaganist acts wisely and does not use their supernatural knowledge to dispense injustice.

I must stop now and execute this naval work elsewhere before I ship the sad extent of my gazing to the fragile neophytes with tender pliable minds a full discovery of my investigations laid out for reading could sail to ga ga shores from whence they may not return. The literary equivalent of LSD, with a potent agent textually expanding their consciousness unlike any other professional windbag gassing on the state of play to be found across all sectors of the contemporary topography today.

"the good god Ogma Jane"

My status as minor deity acknowledged at last!

I'm honoured. ;)