The “Poetry Boom”
At Sewanee Writer’s Conference last summer, there was a panel on online journals. To represent online journals, the organizers chose two editors of print-based journals, one of of which had an online counterpart. The other editor was half-heartedly – almost regretfully – toying with the idea.
During the panel, the latter editor asked who among us would be happy being published on a journal’s web version instead of in its print publication. While well over half of the attendees raised their hands, that apparently wasn’t enough for this editor, who said “See?” and went on to explain why online publication wasn’t perceived to be as prestigious as a print publication.
Believe it or not, we deal with this attitude all the time here at Linebreak: an attitude that Johnathon summarizes as making technophobia a literary badge of honor, an attitude that implies the work we publish is somehow second-tier because it’s not laid out in ink, an attitude that fears the internet is killing off good poetry.
Frankly: I’m calling bullshit. But so is Andrew Motion.
In an article published in the Telegraph titled “Internet ‘is causing poetry boom‘”, the British poet laureate explains his thoughts on the relationship between the internet and poetry: “Poetry as an art form was simply well suited to the internet.”
While the article focuses on how internet communities support poetry readings, which have grown in popularity; how the internet provides a “shop window” for small presses; and how more people seem to be writing poetry lately, Motion sees the internet as returning poetry to the ear in important ways:
He said that because the web allowed people to listen to poetry once more, it had helped return it to the position it held in the “mead halls” 1,000 years ago.
Moreover, the ability to hear poetry online isn’t just rejuvenating an interest in contemporary poetry, but also in the golden oldies:
Websites like Poetry Archive, which enables people to listen to recordings of poets like TS Eliot and Allen Ginsberg reading their work, are now enjoying unprecedented success.
Poetry Archive , which Mr Motion helped set up, now receives 135,000 visitors a month and a million page hits.
The popularity of the Poetry Archive has only led Motion “to conclude that the real problem with poetry was ‘not one of appetite, but of delivery’.”
I couldn’t have said it better myself.
It may be that you’re fighting against some of the same ideas that prevent other print-to-online products have been struggling with for years. Electronic books seem to hold promise, but many people prefer “the feel of a book” to a PADD-like contraption that will probably not function in 10 years. I couldn’t imagine reading a novel on my Apple Newton (circa 1997) or Palm V, and I can imagine my Kindle 2 will look long in the tooth in 2012 while my 1984 edition of “1984″ will still hold up as long as we still speak the English language.
Sites also suffer from the Internet Library of Alexandria problem. One recent blog posting (http://geekoutnewyork.com/2009/01/macuser-net.php) compares internet site guides from over 12 years ago to their existence today and found under 20% of the sites mentioned in the 1996 article survived. How do you get contributors to take an online journal seriously if they cannot refer to their entries in 10 years (seriously, if there’s an answer, I’d like to know)? Will poetryarchive.org point to a squatting page in 2018? Will there still be web pages as we know them? Would anyone know of ‘Leaves of Grass’ if it was only available on Whitman’s expired .Mac homepage?
By the way, the Kindle 2 is pretty impressive. It is so choice. If you have the means, I highly recommend picking one up.
You have good points that some do simply prefer print, and that’s fine, but I see no reason why that invalidates the seriousness or literary merit of online journals, which is the problem I have with, say, the panelists at Sewanee implying that the poetry that would be published in the online counterpart to their journals would somehow be second-tier, which is the only reason I can see that people would prefer to be published in the physical magazine and which seemed to be this panelist’s take: not as many poets would want to be published online, so we’ll be publishing worse pieces in that forum.
Your second point seems more interesting, at least to me, and more valid on some levels. You’re right that if writers don’t trust that an online journal will stick around, they have right to be worried about publishing there.
However, as Motion concluded in the article I quoted in the post, “the real problem with poetry was ‘not one of appetite, but of delivery’”. What’s more important: That an individual poem from your eventual (physical) book be available in ten years, or that it’s delivered more immediately and effectively to an audience hankering for contemporary poetry?
It would seem to me that the more people who read your individual poems, the more people there are who would be interested in reading – and buying – your book. And, online journals are able to draw and maintain audiences more easily than print journals if only due to accessibility.
I know that, in Fayetteville, Arkansas, it’s difficult to get your hands on The Paris Review unless you have a subscription – let alone smaller magazines. But, no matter where you are, as long as you have internet access, you can still read Blackbird or -ahem- even Linebreak. Assuming that books are still physically published and that the author anticipates having one some day – or has plans to release one sooner than some day – there seems to be little reason to worry about the permanence of the publication. To me, at least.
Also, assuming websites stick around as we know them or that old content can be uploaded to websites-of-the-future (!), why wouldn’t an established journal like AGNI still have its online content available in 10 years? What stops a print publication from becoming defunct, unable to sell back-copies?
I suppose they would still have a record of some sort, at least in libraries, but – maybe its just me – I’ve never tried to go back and read a copy of Poetry from 10 years ago. Outside of some scholarly curiosity as to how, say, Wallace Stevens changed his poem between its publication in Poetry and its publication in his book – why would I?
I can understand, vaguely, the novelty of print publications, the romanticism of a printed record of one’s publications – but I still have trouble understanding the whole idea. So it is?