Wednesday, July 04, 2007

What I Could Blog

if I were still blogging for the library:

KGS found an interesting essay, and posted about it to twitter: The Graveyard of the Database, on the National Book Critics Circle Board of Directors blog. It offers a sticker (see right) to put on your own website.

The online world is not a threat to all forms and formats and genres of literary endeavor. The sort of lyric poetry we've been publishing in the Santa Fe Poetry Broadside for the past nine years works very well on-screen. You can count on readers being willing to page down a screenful or two. Occasionally we have done longer prose pieces, and those were more problematic. I loved publishing (for example) Lee Merrill Byrd's Why I Want to Learn Spanish; but if it had been even a couple of inches longer on the screen, it's a good guess that few readers would have read the whole thing. We and our authors and probably our audience are all of an age where we have to print out anything that's longer than a couple of pages if we actually want to read it. Poetry may be a natural exception to this reality, because it is so light on the screen

P.S. The July issue of the Broadside, coming later this month, may be the last. Though I hope we may get a breeze of fresh energy...

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