Ash Bowen's poetry has appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Blackbird, and Black Warrior Review, among other publications. He lives and works in Texarkana, AR.
Jennifer Jabaily's poetry has appeared in Mannequin Envy and Fickle Muses. She's a second-year MFA student at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville.
Ashley Anna McHugh is a third-year MFA student at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Measure, DIAGRAM and Memorious as well as other publications.
Johnathon Williams's poetry has appeared in Best New Poets 2009, the Pebble Lake Review, and Unsplendid. He lives in Fayetteville, AR, with his wife and daughters.
My friend Ida Stewart has a lovely short up at Staccato Fiction, a nicely designed and very well executed online journal for microfiction.
Ida is generally a poet, as you can see from a recent poem at Unsplendid. She’s also good to have around when you’re looking for the 5th Avenue Apple Store in NYC at 2 a.m.
Brian Spears, who was kind enough to provide this week’s recording for Linebreak, has a new poem at Redheaded Stepchild titled “The Hazards in Child Naming.”
Redheaded Stepchild’s guidelines are interesting: the editors only want poems that have been rejected by other publications. Also, the site displays a hit counter next to each poem in that issue’s table of contents.
I still get a lot of blank stares when I start rambling about how all online journals should have RSS feeds, so here’s a recent beginner’s guide to RSS for the uninitiated.
The fall/winter issue of Cerise Press is now online with two new poems from Dorianne Laux, among others. My favorite so far is Laux’s “The Cherry Tree.” An excerpt:
The birds are at the cherries, crying and thrashing, tapping at the tough skins, bathing in the juice. Their beaks are bright with wine in this epoch, this season, this year of the cherry, seeds that traveled by boat from Asia Minor, rolling in the hull, cold against the Black Sea, then poured by handfuls into the soil at Plymouth.
Note to the editors: set yourselves up with an RSS feed so I can add Cerise to Swindle.
Via Sandra B.
The best thing about being in an MFA program is the way it feeds your reading: friends stop you in the hall to cram a photocopy of their favorite new poem into your hands, books are passed around at parties in a kind of infinite borrowing circle so that the person giving you that wrinkled paperback is probably three steps removed from the person who actually bought it. This is particularly helpful for poetry, which is so marginalized compared to other genres that even hearing about new books (especially by new poets) is difficult.
This is what I want more of from the Internet — original poems bundled with a trusted recommendation. So much of what we do online is still commentary, still meta. I want more new source material online. I want the stuff itself.
The online poetry magazine Slope has reopened for viewing with a collection of poems and other materials by Heather Christle. The editors promise “more poets, projects and presentations to follow, both slowly and soon.”
How am I just now discovering this? In an essay published two years ago, Dave Bonta spells out in writing the argument I’ve been making in bars for years: that most online literary magazines are conceptually shackled by their slavish imitation of print publications:
Again, the shape and style of online magazines seems to be hampered by the editors’ slavish imitation of print models with a postal delivery system. And what about those virtual covers I mentioned? They’re often very well designed, but let’s face it: online attention spans are short. Why should I have to click through two, three, or even four pages of front-matter and hunt around for navigation cues just to sample a magazine’s latest content?
More specifically, he argues that online journals could learn a lot by adopting the best practices of blogs.
To fully understand this argument, you must first understand the word “blog” as a term that defines a publishing system rather than a content type. What Dave is really arguing for here (although he might not say it in so many words) is the adoption of blogging platforms, those ready-made publishing systems that provide all the fixings of native web publications (RSS feeds, incremental updating, etc), rather than the adoption of silly memes or the abandonment of editing.
Crafting a literary magazine from a blog platform requires some technical know how and imagination, of course. The default page designs that ship with most blog software are completely unsuited for literary magazines, and nothing says hack job like throwing the words “online journal” over a stock Blogger template. A quality online journal can be crafted from off-the-shelf blogging software, though. Linebreak runs on blogging software, but it looks nothing like the average blog because we spent several months kicking around design ideas before coding an original template that fit our concept.
Although Dave wrote his essay two years ago, very little has changed. One thing I discovered when launching Swindle is how few online poetry journals offer RSS feeds, which have been a staple of web publications for six or seven years. (No Tell Motel does, as do 42 Opus and Poetry, but that’s about it). RSS feeds sprang from a publishing model that emphasizes incremental updates and the supremacy of the individual post, whereas most online lit mags are still following a model from the last century, when the cost of paper and distribution dictated a model that emphasized the issue, a cost efficient bundle of content wrapped in cover art.
The nut graph: Too many online literary magazines seem to be unhappily waiting for the day when they can afford a print run, and ignoring most of the benefits of being a web publication in the meantime.
Publishing any kind of literary journal is hard work, of course, and unpaid, and the people who give up their time to do so deserve thanks. But I think a lot of the lingering prejudice against online magazines in the literary world has to do with how poorly designed and conceived many of them are. And it’s time for that to change.
HTMLGIANT asks its readers what topics they’d like to see addressed in a comprehensive resource for anyone looking to start a literary magazine.
A worthy endeavor, though the wording of the post seems to imply that any new lit magazine would include a print edition, which baffles me.
Update: See the comment from HTMLGIANT’s Roxane. The project is meant to include online-only journals as well. Sometimes I’m punchy in the mornings.
TYPO 13 has been released unto the Interwebs, with new poems by Carolyn Guinzio, Stephen Sturgeon, and Anthony Robinson, to name just a few. Typo is edited by Matthew Henriksen and Adam Clay, the latter of whom, you may remember, contributed a poem to Linebreak last year.
The debut issue of Cerise Press, a new journal edited by Linebreak contributors Karen Rigby and Sally Molini, is now online for your perusal. According to the editors, the journal hopes “to serve as a gathering force where imagination, insight, and conversation express the evolving and shifting forms of human experience.” Rigby and Molini are joined by Fiona Sze-Lorrain, a writer and translator based in Paris.
Linebreak got a nice plug in an article by Sandra Beasley that’s in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers. Her article, “From Page to Pixels: The Evolution of Online Journals” can be read here.
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.
Mandy Brown on the future of the book:
That age has ended. We are now ushering in a new age of books which exist without any physical presence at all, which can be transmitted across oceans in moments, in which annotations and criticisms can be shared in ways no one of the seventeenth century could ever have imagined. (Indeed, ways we of the twenty-first century are only beginning to understand.) And yet we still stubbornly refer to them as “books,” tucking but a sly vowel up front (“ebook”), as if we’re afraid to really admit how much has changed. This naming convention is no less absurd than if the codex was called a “folded scroll” or the scroll a “soft, thin, rolled tablet.” Dramatic changes in form require equally dramatic changes in terms.
Amen to that. I feel this absurdity whenever I describe Linebreak as an “online journal,” when it isn’t a journal at all — it’s a web site that publishes the text and audio of one new poem each week. Phrases like “online journal” and “online magazine” persist only because we have yet to acknowledge the fundamental change that occurs when an online publication stops imitating paper publications in even a modest way.
@Design watch: Online journal Frostwriting publishes poetry, fiction, and translations in an issue-based format that’s surprisingly readable. The success of the format is due in no small part to Colin Lewis’s clean, open design, which uses a javascript accordion to make each issue’s full contents accessible from the front page without cluttering the ample white space. (The design also makes use of my two favorite web fonts: Helvetica Neue and Helvetica.)
The design’s basic aesthetic — gray-on-white text, generous white space, clear headings (often in Helvetica), and red text for links/accents — has become popular among online journals and magazines, maybe because it provides a sense of literacy that seems both modern and classical. (Black, white, and red were the colors of the Gutenberg Bible, and Helvetica was the mainstay font for modern design.) Does this aesthetic have a proper name? I’m calling it avant-print, until someone calls me stupid for doing so.
In a recent two-part editorial, the editor of Free Lunch reportedly took online journals to task for being “poetry dumpsters for poetry that has been rejected by the print magazines.”
I haven’t read the pieces in full (they are, predictably, not available online), but I’m trying to get copies of the issues so I can respond. As you might guess, we here at Unstressed have some definite thoughts about the value and unique capabilities of online journals. (We also have thoughts on how often technophobic ignorance masquerades as literary discernment.) More on this topic soon.
In the meantime, read Diane Lockward’s excellent list of the qualities she looks for in an online journal, as well as the online journals that she admires. Linebreak’s presence in the latter post is a happy accident, nothing more.
