A list of our own? (II)

As both Pam Lu and Roger Pao have (very gently) reminded me, I’ve sort of dropped the ball on the whole Asian American poetics list thing. Besides general busyness, I can offer two pleas: format anxiety and technical ignorance.

There’s been some debate, both here and on Roger’s blog, about whether a listserv is the best way to generate the kind of discussion and community I’m interested in. One commenter chez Roger (“Nick,” who I’m assuming is Nick Carbo), suggested that the era of listservs is over and “blogs are where it’s at.” I’m sympathetic to that, obviously. But I still wonder if a listserv might be good at reaching the broad community of Asian American writers and readers I’m hoping to engage–a community that would not only include younger poets but critics and scholars who have an interest in the field (and who, in my experience, are relatively clueless about the world of blogs).

The group blog and the discussion board have also been suggested as models. I’m nominally a part of several group blogs, and I think they can be fantastic for a few people who are pursuing a group project; I’m less convinced that they are great forums for discussion amongst a fairly large, diffuse group. I’ve never really been happy with any of the few discussion boards I’ve stumbled across; they seem to encourage anonymity and sniping more often than community, but perhaps I’m wrong. If people have models in either of these realms that they think would be promising, I’m all ears.

I think listservs, old-fashioned as they are, can work well for groups of moderate size that already have some sense of community–a sense of shared interests and relations that keeps discussion civil and focused. Not necessarily “among friends,” but perhaps among colleagues. My fantasy is that there exists such a group around Asian American poetry and a listserv would just need to activate it. I will confess, though, that I have no idea if this is true. My friend Dorothy Wang and I often lament that we seem to be the only people around in academia who care about Asian American poetry; I’d hope that the list would prove us wrong.

I don’t see why we couldn’t try several things at once; a group blog, a discussion board, and a listserv aren’t mutually exclusive and might even reinforce each other.

Finally, to technical issues. My only experience in creating lists is on academic networks; nearly all of them still use antiquated LISTSERV software, offering limited features. I have been looking into the idea of hosting the list through the University of Toronto’s system, but they do not even seem to offer archiving, much less any kind of web interface. I’ve been on several Yahoo groups, and I see Google groups as well; can anyone tell me if these seem like better ways to manage a list, or if there are other options that I should consider?