Poetry e-zine on a blog model

Over on the Wom-Po list this week, we’ve engaged in a lively discussion of Ron Offen’s editorial and the nature of web magazines. One name kept cropping up, qarrtsiluni, an e-zine that operates on the blog model.

Co-editor Dave Bonta’s post on the origins of qarrtsiluni at the Blogging Blog raises some pertinent points about web publishing:

And at some point during a site re-design in spring 2006, my co-editor Beth Adams slipped in a new tagline: online literary magazine.

At first, I was a little taken aback. Aren’t blogs and magazines two different things? But then a well-known editor of an established literary magazine took us to task on her personal blog for that very thing, accusing us of claiming to be something we weren’t, and it got me thinking a bit more critically about the lit mag genre.

Why do most online literary magazines continue to publish issues all at once, just like their print counterparts? Does anyone ever sit down and read those massive content dumps from cover to virtual cover? Reading text online can be a real strain on the eyes after more than a couple of pages. And online journals in most other disciplines publish new material whenever it’s ready for publication, so why don’t literary magazines?

I noticed a couple other odd things about the genre. For one, online literary magazines almost never have an RSS feed. Don’t they want readers?

Dave’s post is very readable and it’s worth your time to click through and read in full. Also, he lists some other blog-format poetry e-zines in the comments and you might want to check them out.

He ends his essay with this sentence:

Though blogs, like television, seem to have become associated with shallowness and ephemerality in the public mind, they’re still a great medium with enormous potential for literary and artistic expression.

This word ephemeral keeps popping up. Ron Offen used it in his polemic against web publishing. Maybe I’m just dense, but I consider magazine publishing in either print or online to be somewhat ephemeral. My house is littered with fine print magazines that I read through and then lay aside. When they begin to accumulate, I bag them up and send them off to the Friends Book Cellar, where I hope some one else will buy and read them. But, in truth, who goes back to two-year-old copies of, say, well, Free Lunch?

I’ve said this stuff before and anyway, perhaps living in the midst of nature as I do, I have a skewed idea of ephemeral.

People are, perhaps, more likely to read my backlist by Googling my name than by searching the indices of lit mags.

Diane Lockward is good on the disadvantages of print magazines:

The technical glitches that Offen cites as nasty possibilities�a hard drive crash; a bug; troubles with the hosting site, both technical and financial; the end of the journal and the disappearance of your work from the site�seem to me no worse or more worrisome than the possibility that a print journal will go out of business before your work is published (I’ve had that happen), that there will be delays in delivery (also had that problem, many times), that your work will be inadvertently omitted (don’t even let me get started on this), that your work will appear with typos that can’t be fixed and your bio with your name misspelled (again, don’t let me get started).

Most of these things have also happened to me, and in these cases, the relatively fixed nature of print magazines and anthologies can be distressing.

Speaking of Google, as I was a couple of paragraphs back, except insofar as sites can be taken down, I find that web publication in general and blogs in particular are somewhat deceptive in their ephemerality. My deathless prose of the day may disappear off the front page, but I can assure you that it occasionally comes back to bite me. Because, just like embarrassing Facebook photographs that seemed like fun at the time, the whole blog is still out there in cyberspace.

And here I am, after all, quoting a year-old blog post from Dave Bonta, available at the click of a mouse button.

Readability may be a more serious deficit for online zines. A poem has to be awfully good to keep my attention onscreen, and often I resort to the printer to be able to read a longer work — and there goes the “saves paper” advantage.

Possibly related posts:

Death of a lit mag?

James Baker Hall Memorial Prize in Poetry

Top 100 poetry blogs

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