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Wednesday, July 14, 2010

Poems A Tough Fit

Poetry, the most precise and precious of literary forms, is also so far the least adaptable to the growing e-book market. A three-line stanza might be expanded to four if a line is too long or a four-line stanza compressed into three if the second and fourth lines have sharp indentations, as with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "Hymn to the Night."

Royalty disputes, philosophical objections and suspicions of technology are keeping countless books from appearing in electronic form, from "The Catcher in the Rye" to "Gravity's Rainbow." But for poetry, the gap is especially large because publishers and e-book makers have not figured out how the integrity of a poem can be guaranteed. And a displaced word, even a comma, can alter a poem's meaning as surely as skipping a note changes a song.

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Posted by Suzanne at 9:16 AM
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1 comment:

starcakeastrology.blogspot.com said...

interesting...

3:48 PM

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About Me

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Suzanne
Author of four poetry books including Whipsaw (Anhinga Press 2024) and Fixed Star (JackLeg Press 2022), as well as five chapbooks.

My poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Cincinnati Review, Denver Quarterly, North American Review, Salamander Magazine, South Dakota Review, Latino Poetry: The Library of America Anthology, and elsewhere.

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  • suzannefrischkorn

Interviews

  • Poets in Conversation
  • Small Press Spotlight
  • Poetic Asides
  • First Book

Some Poems & Prose Online

  • A Conversation with James Hoch by Suzanne Frischkorn at The Adroit Journal
  • Best American Poetry
  • Diode
  • Ecotone
  • Juked
  • LOCUSPOINT
  • Los Angeles Review
  • Pine Hills Review
  • SWWIM
  • Terrain - Letter to America
  • The Shore
  • Verse Daily

Blog Archive

Whipsaw

Whipsaw

Fixed Star

Fixed Star

Girl on a Bridge

Girl on a Bridge

Lit Windowpane

Lit Windowpane

Chapbooks

  • American Flamingo (2008)
  • Spring Tide (2005)
  • Red Paper Flower (2004)
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