Not surprisingly, a wide range of English language, grammar, and linguistics blogs occupy an enormous part of web consciousness. The quality of the content, I’ve found, depends on the audience, of course, but it ranges from commercial examinations of business language and its usage to quasi academic studies of the emerging meme of anachronism watching (identifying, examining, defining) in Mad Men. They’re all good as far as I’m concerned, as long as they offer something interesting or provocative about language (I find that one filter, even though its no longer really useful, is whether or not I could use what I find in a classroom). One in particular I follow is Irishman Stan Carey’s language blog “Sentence first: an Irishman’s blog about the English language.” His blog is both odd and curious as well as erudite.
He has a number of curious poems created by what he calls “book mashes” or “spine poems,” so I had to try my own (with apologies to Rimbaud, Rudolfo Anaya, Dylan Thomas, Henry James, Martin Buber, Saul Bellow, Charles Bukowski, John Osborne, and Martin Booth):
A Season in Hell
Bless me, Ultima.
Quite early one morning,
The American,
Good and evil,
With his foot in his mouth,
Betting on the muse,
Look back in anger:
The industry of souls.
Call and Response 