On Jayne Jaudon Ferrer's Your Daily Poem.com, I clicked on her Poetry News page where I found this article.
Poetry doesn't come out so well on an e-reader, it seems. I finally succumbed and bought a Kindle when they came down to a more reasonable price. So far, I'm not impressed, but then I've done very little with it. Now I read that Billy Collins was less than impressed with the way the e-reader destroyed the forms of his poetry.
"I found that even in a very small font that if the original line is beyond a certain length, they will take the extra word and have it flush left on the screen, so that instead of a three-line stanza you actually have a four-line stanza. And that screws everything up," said Collins, a former U.S. poet laureate whose "Ballistics" came out in February.
Now, I wonder if we want Echoes Across the Blue Ridge, Stories, Essays and Poems by Writers Living in and Inspired by the Southern Appalachian Mountains, on Kindle after all. We have excellent poetry from numerous poets in this anthology. How will they feel if their poems are changed due to the inability of the technology to hold the words on the proper lines, keep punctuation in place and keep the integrity of the poem intact?
What do you think? If you are a poet, please let us know by leaving a comment.
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/07/19/BUN21EFS7H.DTL#ixzz126qxVEOz
Glenda, I hope we get a lot of comments from writers who have experience reading electronic material. I admit I need paper to read at my best.
ReplyDeleteI would be more in favor of getting the anthology into book stores and gift shops. That is how we sold Lights in the Mountains and we sold out. I would like to see more energy go into getting the anthology onto the library shelves of schools and colleges in Appalachia.