Epitaph for Santa Fe Poetry Broadside

Here is what I'm proposing we say formally, on our about page:

    Santa Fe Poetry Broadside : Poets of the Region and Beyond has published its final issue.
    The Broadside was edited by Miriam Sagan and Miriam Bobkoff, and was published from June, 1998, to September, 2009.
    We started fairly early in terms of literary magazines on the web; and now we think we are done. Eleven years is a respectably long run, whether we think of ourselves as a very-little magazine or a born-digital epublication. In that time 190 poets, artists and guest editors appeared on our pages, and we thank you all for working with us.
    From the start we did whatever we felt like. If the Broadside wants to publish again, it will. But for now, issue #59 is the final issue.

Here's what I want to say as myself:

On the whole, Mir S. was the one who knew the poets and lined up the issues, and I did the web work. I liked my identity as 'the poets' techie' and used to sign myself that way. There were a couple of times during those eleven years when one or the other of us had lost interest, but we never both lost interest at the same time. Until lately.

Mir S. has moved on. She has umpty publishing/editing venues going, including a lively Facebook life and a blog, Miriam's Well; oversees the community college literary magazine, Santa Fe Literary Review; collaborates with two other New Mexico poets in a small press, Tres Chicas Books; and oh yes, she keeps publishing books of her own work. I think she was ready for the Broadside to stop when I moved to Port Angeles, but I panicked. "No no it's part of my online identity! Who will I be if I can't say, '... and I co-edit a little online poetry magazine...' (And will you still love me if we aren't working together?)" But we both feel that now it's time for it to sail away.

One of our original purposes, beyond the fun of extending our friendship to a joint project, was to help our poets get into the online world. None of the six poets in our first issue were findable on the web in 1998, until we put them out there. And only one of the six had email and sent me their text electronically. All that has changed, and really the 190 writers and artists whom we published in those 11 years don't need us anymore to bump their internet profile.

One of us is a poet and one of us is a librarian, and we are not of one mind about what our long-term preservation responsibilities are. Conceptually, the Broadside was produced in issues and volumes. On the model of the print literary magazines, each current issue would be "on top" at the root address, just as if it had arrived this morning in your (actual) mailbox, and you could page through it, poem to poem.

But I always understood that the real Broadside was a web entity: everything we ever published, all at once. It is archived for digital preservation in LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe), but LOCKKS is a dark archive, not searchable on the web. So I think we need to leave that all-at-once entity online forever, or it doesn't exist anymore. Mir S. says we will leave it online for two years and then re-evaluate. To her, the bottom line is still print: the best of the poems will be republished in the course of each poet's career, we ourselves did a print anthology in 2005, and the rest can after all be allowed to be ephemeral. We'll see.

Meta

Once again have only posted about place, and bypassed the question of my online presence though I think about it nearly all the time: how to make room for posting about my working life somewhere besides Twitter (here? homepage?), putting the Broadside to bed (yes we think we are done, decided when I was in Santa Fe), the question of my next tech purchase (ebook device? netbook?), choosing a domain name...

What Else?

The other thing going on this week is the Santa Fe Poetry Broadside. I put up issue #59 on Wednesday, after long struggles with coding problems and validation problems. By no means all resolved, but it's up. I'll do some retrospective code repair some time between now and when it is time for the next issue (after I'm sure I know what to do). So here it is: Azimuth: Writing on Walls.

This, of course, is not my day job either. Oh wait. I don't have a day job.

Nearly Due East, Nearly Due West

And all of two minds about what I'm doing today. There's a 'wreck' in progress on the outer coast, many birds washing up live and dead, and COASST wants us to go do our surveys soon, so they can try to understand what is causing this mortality event. But I'm in the middle of putting together the next issue of the Santa Fe Poetry Broadside, and (truth) not eager to find myself alone on the beach with 10 or 15 dead birds that have to be recorded properly for science...

Sunrise this morning, nearing the due east point (which from the deck is by the light stanchion at the baseball field two blocks over).

Sunrise, September 13, 2009. Nearing due east. (Click for larger image.)

There was lots and lots of action out on Ediz Hook on Friday. The tanker Prisco Zaliv Amerika (flag Cyprus, home port Limassol) came into the harbor escorted by tug, let out her anchor, the pilot boat went over and picked up the pilot, etc. The tug Edward Brusco pulled his barge Paul Bunyan past the Hook and on into Puget Sound (or anyway eastwards). Many many little recreational fishing boats were up to something, tiny boats, families, little kids in life vests, their trailers putting them into the water or pulling them out. Oooh I just love the moment when the trailer is pulled up the ramp, drizzling harbor water onto the roadway as it goes.

A seaplane no bigger than the little boats suddenly landed, taxi'd to the dock, and disgorged a man with a satchel over his shoulder; the plane was already gone before he made it off the dock, though he was walking fast and proceeded right in through the gate of the pilot station. (Where was he fetched from? Why such a rush?)

Pilot arriving, September 11, 2009 (Click for larger image.)

The sun set already behind Striped Peak on Friday, so no more sun-drops-neatly-into-the-ocean-off-the-Strait for more than six months, eee-too-bad. And I haven't left the house yet, so I guess it's Poetry Broadside today, beach survey tomorrow.

Sunset, September 11, 2009. Nearing the due west point. (Click for larger image.)

Brief Intermezzo (NPR Calls Them "Buttons")

Earlier in the week on both my primary email lists, PubLib and NGC4Lib (Next-Generation Catalogs for Libraries), people were articulate and depressed on the subject of the apparent impending demise of our profession. It made me wish I were not increasingly "unmoored from the Great Library Raft of Raison" (as L.M. put it); I want to have gone down with the ship if it is going down. I want to continue to belong to readers and the servants of readers; to answerers of information needs, shelterers of the needy, purveyors of enjoyments; and to the kind of techies and madmen whose idea of fun is to tinker up projects like John Blyberg's catalog card generator.

I need to put the next issue of the Poetry Broadside up on the web this weekend, it's overdue; and I need to have the discernment to spend the coming last beautiful long days up on the mountain, and then out at the ocean, instead.

http://www.blyberg.net/card-generator/ made this. Thank you, John. (Click for larger image.)

As For Example Now

Here is the humble handmaiden of the muse of poetry, working on the next issue (#57) of the Santa Fe Poetry Broadside. The sky is blue, there's birds, the Strait is blue blue, Mount Baker shining crisp white against the horizon above the house with the red siding. Coho is back, singing out when he leaves or approaches the harbor, or passing the bottom of the street against the blue blue blue water.

Nevertheless, and notwithstanding my rapidly degrading powers of concentration, here I sit; making little web pages instead of being at the ocean. Tomorrow, if I'm good and stay on track (which of course I am not doing right now), I can go west.

The ferry, Coho, trucking by the bottom of the street. (Click for larger image.)Mount Baker, image fiddled to make the mountain stand out... (Click for larger image.)

The Poets' Techie

In September, we put up issue #55 of the Santa Fe Poetry Broadside. Forgot to mention it here.

Issues #56 & #57 are lined up for December & February. We've been doing this online-poetry-magazine gig for more than ten years now, which makes us practically ancient in web terms. I'm glad we're still at it.

From the Poets' Techie

Bringing another piece of my identity to where I am now: Issue #54 of the Santa Fe Poetry Broadside, Ever/ Glade, made it to the web last weekend, three months overdue but finally finished. It was pleasing that the artist is one of my colleagues at my Former Place of Work and a former Floridian, that her linocuts fit so well with M.S.'s Everglades poems.

It could be symmetrical to let the Broadside end here, with this chapbook of the poet/editor's own work. But no. Last summer I asked N. if we could have a collection of the poems he mentioned that are orphaned, that simply didn't fit into each of his published books as he assembled them; that were left behind, over and over. He said yes, so if he hasn't changed his mind, we can see ahead to #55 — and may be safely past the possibility that having the techie/editor geographically elsewhere might kill our little webzine. It might last to its 10th anniversary after all...

Stylistic Remarks

a) When Suzanne V. turned my composition, "Things That Want To Be Counted" into a broadside, not only did she rearrange all the parts, and use very large type for the words she thought most important; she also edited out every single parenthetical aside and explanation. I took that as an important piece of literary criticism, and ever since have been rewriting to eliminate as many parentheses as I manage to notice. If I concentrate I can write without parentheses.

b) For now I will continue to point to posts on either Icarus or Many An Afternoon, as seems pertinent. I haven't quite let go of all that work that it turned out wasn't quite mine and couldn't come away with me. I imagine I will stop pointing to the past after a while.

c) Immediately I will begin to use LibraryThing for bibliographic links, instead of the catalog at my Former Place of Work.

d) I will not necessarily explain myself all the time. Today the haircutter said, as she wrapped the sheet around me, "Didn't you used to work for the library?" "Still do," I said, without thinking; heard myself; but declined to correct it.

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...