Sherry Chandler

The joys of linguini

Diane Lockward’s poem “Linguini” is featured on The Writer’s Almanac today.

“Linguini” is from Diane’s book What Feeds Us, available for Wind Publications.

Diane, always a very generous poet, has recently updated her list of Journals that Accept E-Mail/Online Submissions, complete with links.

Thank you, Diane.

Joy Bale Boone Poetry Prize

The judge this year will be former Kentucky poet laureate Richard Taylor. Taylor, a professor of English at Kentucky State University, is the author of two novels, 5 collections of poetry, and several non-fiction books, mostly relating to Kentucky history. He has received two creative writing fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and an Al Smith Award from the Kentucky Arts Council. His sixth collection of poetry, Rail-Splitter (based on the life of Abraham Lincoln) will be published by Larkspur Press in 2009. He and his wife own Poor Richard�s Books in downtown Frankfort.

Guidelines:

• THR asks for a $5 contribution for up to 3 poems to support the contest and the journal. Please make checks out to The Heartland Review.
• Send a cover page with name, address, and a short biography (30 words maximum) .
• Name and address should not appear on poems.
• Poems should be typed and no longer than 30 lines.
• Send a Self Addressed Stamped Legal-sized Envelope for results.

Winners will be announced in April and invited to read at the Morrison Gallery Poetry Series Poetry Month Celebration.

Mail entries to:

2009 Joy Bale Boone Poetry Prize
c/o Mick Kennedy
Elizabethtown Community & Technical College
600 College Street Road
Elizabethtown, KY 42701

For more information visit our website

E-zines: the question of readability

As I mentioned yesterday, when most people make their list of things they don’t like about online poetry magazines, readability comes high on the list. It’s high on mine.

Dave Bonta has addressed this issue in an e-mail posted on the Wom-Po list, which he has kindly given me permission to quote:

If I were to re-write that [post at Blogging Blog] today, I think I’d be a little less polemical in
regards to online magazines that choose to publish all their material at once. Some of my own favorite journals still follow that pattern. But studies of online reading habits are discouraging, and do suggest that
people tend to skim rather than really read online material. One thing we try to do to counteract that behavior, aside from trickling material out on a near-daily basis, is to provide audio (and you can bet we’d include more video if we had it – we simply can’t afford to send a camera crew to film our contributors!). I bring this up, though, to suggest that the dyspeptic print editor who accused the internet of being “anti-poetry” is not completely out to lunch.

On the other hand, the online audience is potentially huge and multinational. Poetry Daily and Verse Daily each have many thousands of readers, me included. Say what you will about the Web; email is still perhaps the best way to reach people. (And it’s one reason I harp on the importance of RSS feeds: they give publishers a painless route to providing a subscribe-by-email option.)

Dave also suggested that I point you to the FAQ at The Cortland Review, an online lit magazine that answers the question “Why publish on line?” like this:

Editing poetry magazines has always been a labor of love: budgets are tight, distribution scant. The Internet offers publishers a viable alternative: the ability for an interactive multimedia presentation to a global audience, absolutely free. Publishing online, furthermore, honors the tradition that poetry is an oral art and allows for a more intimate connection between poet and audience than print alone. The electronic format, further, allows for access to TCR’s extensive archive, ongoing in both text and audio, available absolutely free to anyone in the world.

…

In Issue 3, we introduced our Read Along with the Author Series, and our journal evolved into something more than we had initially conceived. With the technology of RealAudio, we were able to include voice-recordings of the poets reading their own poems exclusively for The Cortland Review.

Poetry is an oral art, and contributions are enhanced by audio. Readers can sit back and listen to the poets read aloud while they follow along in text. This dynamic creates an intimate connection between poet and audience.

I love the chance to hear a poet read. Sometimes I have found that, when I can’t understand a poet’s line on the page, hearing him/her read will clarify.

Of course, I may be prejudiced because I’m a good reader myself with a sometimes eccentric line.

Nevertheless, I think the ability to add audio is a great plus for online publishing.

__________
Speaking of video zines, let me remind you of Jessie Carty’s Shape of a Box.

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.