Ron Silliman Shuts Down the Monkey Cages

I was visiting Ron Silliman's blog because I had read that he was shutting down his comments stream because it had turned into a monkey cage (not his words, I'm paraphrasing).

I can only imagine that must have been an exhausting thing to wade through every day. Taking the garbage out. And then signing onto the computer and doing it all over again.

The first word that comes to mind is augean. Those old comment boxes probably still smell like the Augean stables.

I bet he ends up feeling so liberated he'll wish he had done it years ago.

I remember joking with a friend after I had "sup'd full with horror" reading a few of those tempests in a teapot that I had to stop hanging out at blogs where the only commentators were straight white men. Angry straight white men.

It was so evident that some of those people must have had no life at all--I mean before they discovered that Ron's blog could function quite as well as that big inflatable room at the carnival where kids jump up and down and give each other nosebleeds when they smack their heads together. Since there's, like, no real floor.

And that's what most of those guys suffered from: no real floor.

But they sure managed to keep their heads in the clouds.

I always thought of them as The Popinjay School.

Maybe they should start their own poetry movement. The Commentites. Maybe they can create a monastery. Take a vow which is the opposite of the Trappists' vow. To never shut up. Because some of them are going to clearly need therapy or a fresh new addiction or something to replace their hourly disgorgements of wisdom from the top of Mount Parnassus. I mean in between watching dvr'ed episodes of South Park, no doubt while reading Ezra Pound with the other half of their brain. I imagine that's how they read everything. Here is your brain. Here is your brain on comment box: South Park/Ezra Pound.

Ezra Pound and Eric Cartman have got to be related.

But I am worried that some of them might crash now that their raison d'etre has ceased to be. Did anybody set up a wellness/suicide watch on these people?

Because he's thrown them back into the ocean.

And the ocean is much bigger than a comment box.

Ron, can't you hear them drowning? What did Keats say? Oh yes: "Up bubbles, all his amorous breath."

I picture them in the middle of the ocean treading water, each one of them holding a blue megaphone above the water and using it to scream at the others that "It's all your fault!"

If only Ron had called in Nanny Rescue or Nanny 911.

The intervention might have worked. Jo can work miracles.

But it's all moot now.

Ten to one they create a Commentary Blog and all use it communally to continue their fun and games.

"I am Sir Oracle, and when I ope my mouth let no dog bark."

They should all get that silk screened onto t-shirts.

It's a sad day for trolls in the poetry kingdom.

Someone please sound a sarcastic knell.

Where's Thomas Gray when you need him?