As a quick glance over this blog (or Ruminate) will make clear, I’ve yet to figure out the forms that are my own best fit for blog writing. I feel intuitively that there’s an undiscovered, Platonic form out there in the hazy region where prose poems, free-form essays, and micro-fictions live– something sinewy and interconnected, something satisfying on the screen but still significant– that I could settle comfortably into.
My intuition might simply be confusion. I strongly believe the features of the "Read/Write Web"– lightweight publishing mechanisms, reputation systems, space for commentary, and the hidden plumbing of web feeds– hold an inconceivable amount of promise to rehabilitate, renew and advance those three forms (which are increasingly difficult to distinguish from one another): prose poems, flash fiction, and brief essays. The last seems particularly fit for the medium. When Montaigne first used the term "essai" he did so with its literal meaning in mind, intending that what he was writing was an "attempt" at writing something new, in a new way. Where prose poetry and flash fiction inherently tend toward being small, highly polished jewels, there’s a healthy strand of essays that retain a kind of ragged, informal glory.
Isn’t the world of blogs and wikis a perfect one in which to return to the principles of essays as assays? The new essai could be a form uniquely suited to the prosumer, enthusiast nature of the net.
I’m not talking about creating more actual links or an increase in explicit, technologically assisted hypertextuality. Those aspects of the media interest me, but less than the general idea of form in individual posts and then how those posts create aggregate forms, both intentional and those that coalesce serendipitously through the actions of users browsing and searching as well as by virtue of technological elements such as tags and categories.
I’ve been thinking about this subconsciously for a while, but with more attention as I brainstormed my latest mini-project: for the rest of March I’ll be writing an abecedarium of sorts– 26 essais from A-Z– that live somewhere in that interstitial space between, and encroaching upon, prose poems and "in short" creative nonfiction.
While not exactly what I have in mind, I was inspired by Priscilla Long’s "My Brain On My Mind," a fantastic piece about the brain’s workings, memory, and cognition told through the lens of the story of her grandfather… in the form of an abecedarium.
