Sherry Chandler

No more Free Lunch

As I mentioned, I have been in the zone, writing on a project. And because of my preoccupation, I have neglected to mention a sad event.

When I opened my latest issue of Free Lunch, number 42, I found tucked inside a note that reads

The Board of Directors of Free Lunch Arts Alliance regrets to inform you that Number 42 of Free Lunch will be its final issue. Ron Offen, the editor and founder of Free Lunch, has health issues that prevent him from continuing the magazine.

Ron Offen was one of the first magazine editors to publish my work. He took my poem “Sometimes She Forgets What She Wants” back in 2001, and I’ve been getting my Free Lunch ever since.

Sometimes I would send a contribution at the end of the year and sometimes I would mean to and forget. Whichever way it was, I always got my copy. Free Lunch was free to serious poets and I was bona fide.

I enjoyed reading Offen’s editorials, though I didn’t always agree with them, and I always found good poems in the magazine.

That’s true of this last issue that has memorable poems by Louis McKee, Gilbert Allen, A. D. Winans, and 32 pages of others.

Now there’s no more Free Lunch. I’ll lmiss it.

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.

Pinsky on technology and the language

Here’s that passage from Robert Pinsky in Rattle that I was thinking about yesterday. It is not directly relevant, I suppose, to what Ron Offen was saying, except insofar as it argues that technology is actually linguistically conservative:

Language has become so conservative in modern times, though we pretend to find it changing. The more technology there is, the more language tends to be frozen and stay the same. In a pre-literary culture, language changes very rapdily. . . . It’s an arrogance or a misapprehension of the present to think, Oh we’re changing the language so rapidly, with our computers and cellphones; but no. The computer technology and the rest of it—we may get a few neologisms out of our technology, and slang expressions always are generated. But compared to the past, each new form of communication technology freezes the language a little bit more, removes it from the fluidity of oral communication. . . . we’re responsible for always trying to think about what’s good, what’s bad in language—which is to say, what’s meaningless, what’s empty, what’s jargon, what’s hollow—that whole George Orwell project is suitable because language is always manipulated by some crooks or the other, often quite powerful crooks, trying to steal or bully. And it’s healthy to question the precision or expressive usefulness of language as it is used. But maybe it’s also, equally, healthy to accept the inventiveness of language.

In pondering this question of ephemerality, it occurs to me that poetry is always ephemeral. Little print magazines come and go as rapidly as little on-line magazines do and they disappear pretty completely except for a few archived copies. Geof Huth has done good work in this area.

It has also been my experience that one can find just as much bad poetry in print as online, but I’m a democrat and think there should be outlets for anybody who wants to put work out there. And actually, it’s not the downright bad poetry that is such a problem. Sometimes it can have great energy. It’s the mediocre poetry that is deadly. And yet, people seem to like it.

But back to the point: we not only lose magazines, we also lose the language and the culture from which the poetry was generated, as Harry has pointed out in his recent discussion of Beowulf.

As I said yesterday, I’m old and I like that idea of having my poetry in a book that I can hold in my hand and pass down to my intellectual grandchildren. I also like the idea of an “album” of music and resist buying songs one at a time for an mpg player.

But at base, I think both art and language are a great ever-changing dynamic. Once they’re set, they’re dead.

Future of reading

I have received Free Lunch # 40, and as I always do with this publication, I turned first to Editor Ron Offen’s editorial. For Autumn 2008, Ron is explaining why he will never make Free Lunch an online publication. The title gives a clue: Poetry and the Web II (The Ephemeralization and Degradation of Poetry).

Are web publications ephemeral? Are their standards too low? Questions that only time will settle, I suppose. One of Ron’s arguments, I think may be a function of age. Those of us who grew up with books find them more comforting, easier on the eyes, easier on the concentration. But there may be a downside to linear English printed on the page. It may favor certain types of intelligence. That argument is also not one that I can win.

(There is something about this in Robert Pinksky’s interview in Rattle, but I don’t have that volume with me at the moment. I’ll come back to that later maybe. I think the question is more oriented toward the effect of texting on grammar.)

It is Offen’s final point that interests me here:

Finally, those fostering online poetry are apparently convinced that print is (or will soon will be) an obsolete medium. Considering the current demise of many newspapers and magazines, whose former readers are increasingly obtaining their news and information on television and online, this is a compelling argument. Yet studies also show that more and more books are being published and purchased in recent years. And what about the lines that form outside bookstores awaiting the first sales of books like those of the Harry Potter series? Also, did Billy Collins’ poetry books become bestpsellers because he was published so widely online? Moreover, even if such naysayers of print are right (which is highly doubtful), why would e-zine editors, who presumably care about the future of poetry, trust its future to a medium that is essentially anti-poetic? Why would they promote—to coin a word—the ephemeralization of the art?

While I’ll admit to being one who wants to see my work in print, Kathryn Greenhill, blogging at Librarians Matter, is not so sanguine about the future of the book, and she’s a little worried about the future of the library (that bastion of free speech). She asks What future the library? and suggests that those institutions would be wise to prepare for a bookless future. Via.

Like Ron Offen, I find the prospect of a bookless future bleak and can’t quite wrap my head around cuddling up with a good Kindle. Still, I’m beginning to think I’ve reached my fuddy-duddy years.

Does anybody remember the term fuddy-duddy?

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Addendum: Here is Diane Lockward on Ron Offen’s editorial:

Nevertheless, online journals are here and that’s just a fact. And not such an unpalatable one. There are things an online journal can do that a print one can’t: add lovely graphics, include links to other literary sites, correct mistakes. Some journals have added audio which is wonderful. I like reading the poem and then being able to listen to the poet read it aloud, especially if the poet lives somewhere far away from me. Now Offen makes it clear that he feels these additions detract from the poetry rather than add to it. I disagree.

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).

Read the whole post. Read Blogalicious, often (though she doesn’t often write about Offen.)