October 19, 2010
The Digital Fate of Poetry
by Kelly Burdick
When coverage by NPR and a call from the Poetry Foundation.
Allen Ginsberg’s Collected Poems, the story got a good bit of attention, including“Why the attention?” asks Teicher, in a follow-up article for PW. “Not because people care deeply about the digital fate of poetry, but, I think, because the difficulties of formatting poetry e-books are magnified versions of the problems all publishers are having with getting their e-books to look as good as print books.”
He advances the story–his original complaint was that “the liniation of the poems in the book was all messed up”–by identifying a key problem and by suggesting a few solutions. “Keep in mind,”
“that liniation on the page is one of the main ways poetry communicates its meaning — lines largely are why poetry isn’t prose…. [and] no one seems to have a foolproof solution for how to stop line breaks from getting at least somewhat screwed up if the font is made too large on an e-reader or app.”According to
The obvious solution, writes “is to do the coding by hand, book by book, so each book is formatted according to the needs of its text.”As a test, he sent Joshua Tallent, founder of the firm eBook Architects, a stanza from John Keats‘s “Ode to a Nightingale” so he could format it in e-pub by hand. The result looks like this:
Which produces a page that should display on an e-reader as:
Kelly Burdick is the executive editor of Melville House.