An interesting article entitled “2000-2009: The Decade in Poetry” is online now at The Poetry Foundation site. Nine poets, nine points of view–all intriguing. Most notable for Perpetual Bird readers may be the fact that I find myself in total agreement with one of the nine, Ron Silliman, whose take on the impact of new publishing technologies (online and print) deserves to be fleshed out by someone (not me–maybe Ron himself?). It would be interesting, for example, to conduct a survey of poets to find out how much of the poetry they read is obtained from (1) brick-and-mortar bookstores, (2) online book outlets, (3) print on demand services like Lulu.com or MagCloud, and (4) strictly online publications such as Drunken Boat or Jacket Magazine or blogs. Then a demographic overlay would break down the responses by age, location (rural, suburban, urban; region of the country); even income, which I suspect may be the “third rail” of American poetics (I might be completely mistaken, of course: maybe there are just as many Wittgenstein fans among poets in the bottom quintile of incomes as among those in the top quintile). Where are you, oh graduate students in statistics with a literary bent, when we really need you?