Imagine the following disclaimer after accessing the online version of the New York Times: Some readers have pointed out that the text on the site is difficult to read. To remedy this, there is a freeware program called Readability that lets you change various aspects of a site's presentation and layout for easier reading.Given the New York Times' reputation for journalistic excellence, most subscribers would, with mild annoyance, forgive and accommodate the inconvenience.
Unfortunately, this is not something novice websites should risk assuming; lazily asking users to download fix-it patch ware, which is exactly what I discovered upon first viewing The Argotist Online, successor to the now defunct The Argotist arts magazine.
It should come as no surprise to those intent on creating a successful website that first time visitors often predict and judge the quality of a site's content based on nothing more than a shallow, casual glance. If the site fails to attract readers based on an initial impression of ease, function, and accessibility, and regardless of how brilliant and insightful the site's content may be, viewer traffic will hardly extend beyond an immediate circle of friends, colleagues and contributors.
Added to The Argotist Online's garish fluorescent yellow disclaimer, is its use of muted white font against a black background, with bright green and blue highlights for works and titles featured; were I not obligated to appraise the entirety of The Argotist Online, I'd have missed indefinitely much that is good about the site's published content.
The Argotist Online is devoted exclusively to poetry and poetics, and what I appreciate most about Jeffrey Side's website is the studied care taken to explore and legitimate a set of philosophies particular to the style of postmodern poetry he's chosen to promote. Two such articles stand out; first is Jeffrey Side's 'Empirical and Non-Empirical Identifiers,' a superb discussion comparing the limitations and elements of conventional, signs based poetry (distinguished by its use of metaphors, similes, and grammatical syntax, to list just a few) to an experimental poetry utilizing inter-textuality, among various other techniques, as a means to invite reader participation in the generation and negotiation of meaning:
Aside from suggesting some further critical tools that may be of use to criticism there is also the possibility that this undertaking will have artistic value in that it may encourage the individual reader to ultimately decide upon the meaning of a poetic text, either unconsciously or by volition. By "volition" I mean the conscious determination of the reader to decide upon any one of a number of associations the words and phrases of any given sentence suggest, and to choose this particular association as the constituent of meaning despite its being the less obvious or appropriate choice (in comparison to the others) given the complete denotative meaning the sentence's lexis implies. This sort of practice is possible because the poetic text is arguably without intentionality: both in the sense of having no meaning inherently, and of the impossibility of its having an authorial intent conferred upon it.
The second article is Eric Denut's interview with Charles Bernstein, Regan Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, who offers a compelling defense against the critics of postmodern poetry:
Poetry's social function is to imagine how language works within its culture, while pursuing a critique of the culture; this suggests that poetry can be a countermeasure to the reinforcement of cultural values at the heart of both popular entertainment and consumer politics.
While The Argotist Online boasts an intriguing and distinguished collection of essays, interviews, and articles, exploring a wide array of topics on the philosophy, aesthetics, and cultural significance of poetry, the quality of the poems presented is mixed at best.
Postmodern poetry is immediately problematic; the line that separates effective and meticulously wrought grammatical and stylistic innovation from the slapdash practitioner who breaks rules for no other reason than their inability to first adhere to the rules of convention is fine indeed. Regrettably, there is simply too much mediocre poetry to sift through to warrant a prolonged search for the few jewels that do exist.
How about a specimen of just one "jewel" and one mediocre poem, with justification for your claim about them?
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