Once in college and beyond the pressures of my home community, rampant downloading gave me free range with new music genres on the one hand, but, on the other hand, it also ruined my patience with the album as a form. I’ve since found that patience/appreciation, though with plenty of “catching up” still to do . .

All of which is to say, I don’t much trust my personal connections between music and cultural happenings.

And, yet, it seems to me that my unwieldy background doesn’t really look all that particular these days.

In terms of Coldfront, while I’m new to that site, my impulse is to say that it seems that poetry might finally be borrowing the top-charts exposure/consumption model of pop art. If so, my hope is that machines such as these will expand the current elite-like knowledge of the many worthy voices standing rows behind the select winners of our most prestigious literary awards. Even if I’m being optimistic about that last point, poetry might need this model now. With social media, blogging, online journals, &c. flaring up and adding to the sheer amount of poetry produced each year (and I don’t mean that as a negative), in order to accurately sample what’s out there, perhaps we will eventually come to rely on yearly top-40 lists, especially for newer readers trying to get traction on the poetry scene (alongside their studies of what’s come before, of course).

Or, these are my immediate scattered thoughts anyways . .