The Sound of One Wing Flapping: The Art of the Poetry Blurb

“Trying to compare the blurbs on a book of poetry to the contents is like trying to compare a description of angel wings to actual angel wings. The blurbs employ extravagantly unverifiable descriptions of the contents (what is ?intensely somatic?? a ?one-hundred ring verbal circus?? who says it‘s?brilliant? and why?) to contents that are themselves indescribable. How do you determine the accuracy of a description of the indescribable?”Joan Houlihan

—The Sound of One Wing Flapping: The Art of the Poetry BlurbWeb Del Sol)

Now I remember why I don’t read this site anymore: it’s not blogger friendly. First of all, the website uses frames, thus making it hard to link to a specific internal URL. Even if you find the internal URL, all the navigation is in another frame, so the readers you send to the internal page will be stranded. Second, the above article is part of a running feature called “The Boston Comment”. Whenever the next feature comes out, I presume it will be posted at the URL I’ve linked to above. The previous articles are then moved to a new, permanent location. Here’s Boston Comment 5, but when I type the URL for Boston Comment 6, I get 404. The current content hasn’t already been archived. I like the content of Web Del Sol, but I think their website design could be improved. For instance, their features page includes a long list of recurring columns, each introduced with a big colorful logo. But you can’t click the logo — instead, you have to look beneath the logo, and beneath the blurb, for a text link. Really, how hard would it be to make the logo into a link? If I hadn’t planned to write this comment describing my difficulty blogging an article on Web Del Sol, I certainly would have given up. Perhaps the editors don’t want outsiders to link to their features.