Sherry Chandler

What is moving in a poem

In a way that these things sometimes happen, after I made my post yesterday about sincerity and form as an essential part of a poem, I ran across this interview with Mark Jarman in The Cortland Review for January 1999. Asked what he first noticed about a poem, Jarman said:

The first thing I notice about a poem, if I am reading it, is its shape on the page. After that, I notice all sorts of things. I wish I could claim that, like W. H. Auden, I looked first at what the poem was doing technically. But that’s not altogether true. I read the poem and expect it to move me. For that to happen I have to notice everything, of course, consciously and unconsciously. In one poem it will be an apt and surprising metaphor, in another it will be a particular way with rhythm.

What is noteworthy here is that it is the formal elements of the poem that Jarman mentions, not necessarily the sincerity of the speaker or the depth of emotion expressed. For Jarman, it seems, form and emotional impact are inseparable.

Jarman follows this statement up with a close analysis of the form of Emily Dickinson’s #341, “After great pain, a formal feeling comes�” For him the poem is moving because of the formal decisions Dickinson makes. I urge you to read at least the first two questions and answers. Jarman articulates what I have not.

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.

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