Top Five Explanation

James is frustrated... "But I'm also a tad frustrated, because I don't know what I did this week that made the space better than it was last week."

Let me shed a little light on my selection process.

First, I read a good number of blogs each week. Many are not poetry related. There are some great ones, but they have to touch on the core subject of poetry and poetics to be able to count in my Top Five list.

Next, I like to see some poetry itself. It isn't a mandate, but poetry or poetic discussions put forward by the bloggers themselves are helpful at gaining my attention.

I would like to see balance. If I wanted to focus on a strictly serious academic blog of poetics, Ron Silliman (hypothetically of course) would win each week. I like a balance of humor, other items the blogger has found interesting and linked to, quotations that expand the mind and to a lesser degree, the aesthetic appearance of the blog. The latter I usually only go to if I am having to decide between two blogs that are otherwise scoring a tie with me for that week.

As for James, or anyone else that feels like the won one week with a weaker (or about the same) blog that say they had the previous week... they must understand that some weeks the overall competition is tougher than others.

Yes, James the weekly top five is labor intensive on my part. I have a number of projects that I am working on besides my own poetry. The major one being a book about the San Francisco Giants home for forty years, Candlestick Park. I am reaching a point where this project (to stay on deadline) may cause me to rethink the Weekly Top-Five List.
Posting the results are not the biggest time consumption part of the process. Reading and notating or scoring the blogs themselves is the biggest consumption of time involved. I do feel I benefit from the exposure to the blogs so it is a positive experience. It is also in this context that I feel the Top-Five List provides others who have worked hard on their posts with some acknowledgement and kudos.

My site meter suggests that each week we have new readers. If I can point a few people to other interesting blogs that they may not have seen before, then everyone involved gains.

I hope this gives some clarity to my process of selection.