JACKSON MAC LOW’s book 20 Forties was published by Zasterle (Canary Islands). Earlier this year, a large concert of his works was performed in Dettenhausen, Germany, and he read at the Bjørnson Festival in Norway. He won the 1999 Tanning Prize from the Academy of American Poets.
NATHANIEL MACKEY’s newest book of poetry is Whatsaid Serif (City Lights Books). Forthcoming are Atet A.D. (volume three of his ongoing fiction From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate), due out in 2001 from City Lights, and Four for Glenn, a chapbook of poems due to appear from Arcturus Editions. Callaloo recently published a special issue focusing on his work.
MARK McMORRIS is the author of The Black Reeds (University of Georgia Press) and Moth-Wings (Burning Deck). He teaches at Georgetown University.
MALINDA MARKHAM teaches at Daito Bunka University in Tokyo. Earlier work of hers appeared in Conjunctions:33.
CAROL MOLDAW’s most recent book is Chalkmarks on Stone (La Alameda Press). A bilingual edition of her poems Pencereden/Through the Window was published in 1998 in Istanbul. She lives and teaches in Pojoaque, New Mexico.
HONOR MOORE’s new collection, Darling, will be published next year by Grove/Atlantic. Her other books include The White Blackbird, a life of her grandmother, the painter Margaret Sargent, and a collection of poems, Memoir (Chicory Blue Press).
LAURA MORIARTY’s recent books are Nude Memoir (Krupskaya), The Case (O Books), L’Archiviste (Zasterle Press), Symmetry (Avec Books), Spicer’s City (Poetry New York) and the short novel Cunning (Spuyten Duyvil). Also, a reprint of Duse is just out from Paradigm Press. She is assistant director of Small Press Distribution in Berkeley, California.
ANDREW MOSSIN’s Drafts for Shelley will be published later this year by Beautiful Swimmer Press. “The Forest” is the concluding section of The Epochal Body, a book-length poem.
MELANIE NEILSON’s next collection of poems is forthcoming in 2001. Excerpts from another project, The Moth Detective, will begin appearing online in winter 2000. She is Executive Producer of Programming at MaMaMedia, a new media company for children.
CHARLES NORTH is the author, most recently, of New and Selected Poems (Sun & Moon Press) and No Other Way: Selected Prose (Hanging Loose). His The Nearness of the Way You Look Tonight will be published by Adventures in Poetry this fall.
ALICE NOTLEY’s latest book is Mysteries of Small Houses (Penguin), which won the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Poetry and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
JENA OSMAN’s The Characters was published by Beacon Press. She co-edits the magazine Chain with Juliana Spahr and teaches in the graduate writing program at Temple University in Philadelphia.
MICHAEL PALMER’s most recent book of poetry is The Promises of Glass (New Directions). A prose work, The Danish Notebook, appeared from Avec Books last fall. A book of selected essays and talks, Form’s Mind, is in preparation.
BIN RAMKE is editor of the Contemporary Poetry Series for the University of Georgia Press and the Denver Quarterly. His first book, The Difference Between Night and Day, won the Yale Younger Poets Award. His most recent book of poems is Wake (University of Iowa Press).
DONALD REVELL is the author of six collections of poetry, most recently There Are Three and Beautiful Shirt, both from Wesleyan. He is a professor of English at the University of Utah.
TESSA RUMSEY is the author of Assembling the Shepherd (University of Georgia Press).
JEROME SALA’s latest book is Raw Deal: New and Selected Poems (Jensen/Daniels).
PETER SACKS’s newest collection is O Wheel (University of Georgia Press).
LESLIE SCALAPINO’s recent books include New Time and The Public World/Syntactically Impermanence (both Wesleyan University Press) and E-hu (Atelos Press).
ANDREW SCHELLING teaches Sanskrit, poetry and wilderness writing at Naropa University. His recent books include The Cane Groves of Narmada River: Erotic Poems from Old India (City Lights Press) and The Road to Ocosingo (Smokeproof Press). Forthcoming from Talisman House is Tea Shack Interiors: New & Selected Poetry.
LEONARD SCHWARTZ’s latest books are Words Before the Articulate: New and Selected Poems (Talisman House) and A Flicker at the Edge of Things: Essays on Poetics (Spuyten Duyvil).
DAVID SHAPIRO’s books include Lateness, House (Blown Apart), To An Idea and After A Lost Original, as well books on John Ashbery, Jim Dine, Jasper Johns and Mondrian.
BRENDA SHAUGHNESSEY’s first book of poetry, Interior with Sudden Joy, was published in 1999 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. She is currently a Bunting Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute in Boston.
REGINALD SHEPHERD’s third book, Wrong, was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, which also published his previous two books, Some Are Drowning (1993 AWP Award) and Angel, Interrupted. The poems in this issue are from the manuscript of his work-in-progress, Otherhood. He teaches at Cornell University.
The title poem of RON SILLIMAN’s most recent book, (R), appeared in Conjunctions:21. “Fubar Clus” is from VOG, a section of his “longpoem,” The Alphabet. A recent recipient of a Pew Fellowship in the Arts, Silliman lives in Pennsylvania.
The Fly-Truffler, GUSTAF SOBIN’s latest novel, was published by W. W. Norton. His book of essays, Luminous Debris (Reflecting on Vestige in Provence and Languedoc), also appeared this year from the University of California Press. He lives in Provence.
JULIANA SPAHR is the author of Response (Sun & Moon Press), Everybody’s Autonomy (forthcoming from University of Alabama Press) and the tentatively titled Fuck You—Aloha—I Love You (forthcoming from Wesleyan University Press). She lives in Honolulu.
COLE SWENSEN is a poet who also translates contemporary French poetry, prose and art criticism. Her most recent books are Noon (Sun & Moon Press) and Try (Iowa University Press).
ARTHUR SZE’s latest book, The Redshifting Web, was published by Copper Canyon Press. He is the recipient of a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writer’s Award. A new collection, The Silk Dragon: Translations of Chinese Poetry, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon next year.
JOHN TAGGART’s most recent book is When the Saints (Talisman).
ANNE TARDOS is the author of Cat Licked the Garlic (Tsunami), Mayg-shem Fish (Potes & Poets), Uxudo (Tuumba Press/O Books) and Among Men (forthcoming).
NATHANIEL TARN has three forthcoming books: The Architextures, from Chax Press; Three Letters from the City: The St. Petersburg Poems 1968–98, from Weaselsleeves Press, Santa Fe, and Borey Art Center, St. Petersburg; and a large Selected Poems: 1950–2000, from Wesleyan University Press.
JAMES TATE is the author of numerous books of poetry, including Shroud of the Gnome and Worshipful Company of Fletchers, both published by Ecco Press, and Selected Poems (Wesleyan University Press), which won the Pulitzer Prize and the William Carlos Williams Award. Tate’s newest book of poems, Memoir of the Hawk, will be published by Ecco Press in 2001.
ROBERTO TEJADA has written on contemporary art and photography for Aperture, Art Nexus, Camerawork, Luna córnea and Third Text. He is the author of the collection Gift + Verdict (Leroy).
ANNE WALDMAN has written many books of poetry, including, most recently, Marriage: A Sentence, a prose journal from Penguin Poets. She is also the author of Iovis, Books I and II and Vow to Poetry, a collection of talks and interviews forthcoming from Coffee House Press. Devil’s Workin Overtime, a CD, is also in progress. She is a Distinguished Professor of Poetry at Naropa University.
KEITH WALDROP’s newest books are The Silhouette of the Bridge (Avec), Analogies of Escape (Burning Deck) and Haunt (Instance).
ROSMARIE WALDROP lives in Providence, Rhode Island, where she edits Burning Deck books with Keith Waldrop. Her most recent books of poems are Reluctant Gravities (New Directions), Split Infinities (Singing Horse Press) and Another Language: Selected Poems (Talisman House). A translation of Edmond Jabès’s Desire for a Beginning/Dread of One Single End is forthcoming from Granary Press.
MARJORIE WELISH’s publications include The Annotated “Here” a
nd Selected Poems (Coffee House Press); Else, In Substance (Paradigm Press); and Begetting Textile (Equipage). She recently published Signifying Art: Essays on Art after 1960 (Cambridge University Press).
SUSAN WHEELER is the author of three collections of poetry: Bag ‘o’ Diamonds (University of Georgia Press), Smokes (Four Way Books) and Source Codes (SALT).
ELIZABETH WILLIS is the author of The Human Abstract (Penguin). She teaches at Mills College.
C. D. WRIGHT’s most recent book is Deepstep Come Shining (Copper Canyon Press). She is currently collaborating on a book project with photographer Deborah Luster titled One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana.
JOHN YAU’s forthcoming books include My Heart Is That Eternal Rose Tattoo (Black Sparrow Press) and Borrowed Love Poems (Penguin). He was recently appointed Artist in Residence at the Mount Royal Graduate School of Art at the Maryland Institute, College of Art. During the past summer, he taught at Bard and the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center.
KEVIN YOUNG’s first book, Most Way Home, won the National Poetry Series Award. His second collection, To Repel Ghosts, was named a finalist for the 2000 James Laughlin Award and will appear in spring 2001 from Zoland Books. He recently edited Giant Steps: The New Generation of African American Writers, an anthology of fiction, poetry and nonfiction. He teaches poetry and film at University of Georgia.
A Note from Open Road Media
Long before they were ever written down, poems were organized in lines. Since the invention of the printing press, readers have become increasingly conscious of looking at poems, rather than hearing them, but the function of the poetic line remains primarily sonic. Whether a poem is written in meter or in free verse, the lines introduce some kind of pattern into the ongoing syntax of the poem’s sentences; the lines make us experience those sentences differently. Reading a prose poem, we feel the strategic absence of line.
But precisely because we’ve become so used to looking at poems, the function of line can be hard to describe. As James Longenbach writes in The Art of the Poetic Line, “Line has no identity except in relation to other elements in the poem, especially the syntax of the poem’s sentences. It is not an abstract concept, and its qualities cannot be described generally or schematically. It cannot be associated reliably with the way we speak or breathe. Nor can its function be understood merely from its visual appearance on the page.” Printed books altered our relationship to poetry by allowing us to see the lines more readily. What new challenges do electronic reading devices pose?
In a printed book, the width of the page and the size of the type are fixed. Usually, because the page is wide enough and the type small enough, a line of poetry fits comfortably on the page: What you see is what you’re supposed to hear as a unit of sound. Sometimes, however, a long line may exceed the width of the page; the line continues, indented just below the beginning of the line. Readers of printed books have become accustomed to this convention, even if it may on some occasions seem ambiguous—particularly when some of the lines of a poem are already indented from the left-hand margin of the page.
But unlike a printed book, which is stable, an ebook is a shape-shifter. Electronic type may be reflowed across a galaxy of applications and interfaces, across a variety of screens, from phone to tablet to computer. And because the reader of an ebook is empowered to change the size of the type, a poem’s original lineation may seem to be altered in many different ways. As the size of the type increases, the likelihood of any given line running over increases.
Our typesetting standard for poetry is designed to register that when a line of poetry exceeds the width of the screen, the resulting run-over line should be indented, as it might be in a printed book. Take a look at John Ashbery’s “Disclaimer” as it appears in two different type sizes.
Each of these versions of the poem has the same number of lines: the number that Ashbery intended. But if you look at the second, third, and fifth lines of the second stanza in the right-hand version of “Disclaimer,” you’ll see the automatic indent; in the fifth line, for instance, the word ahead drops down and is indented. The automatic indent not only makes poems easier to read electronically; it also helps to retain the rhythmic shape of the line—the unit of sound—as the poet intended it. And to preserve the integrity of the line, words are never broken or hyphenated when the line must run over. Reading “Disclaimer” on the screen, you can be sure that the phrase “you pause before the little bridge, sigh, and turn ahead” is a complete line, while the phrase “you pause before the little bridge, sigh, and turn” is not.
Open Road has adopted an electronic typesetting standard for poetry that ensures the clearest possible marking of both line breaks and stanza breaks, while at the same time handling the built-in function for resizing and reflowing text that all ereading devices possess. The first step is the appropriate semantic markup of the text, in which the formal elements distinguishing a poem, including lines, stanzas, and degrees of indentation, are tagged. Next, a style sheet that reads these tags must be designed, so that the formal elements of the poems are always displayed consistently. For instance, the style sheet reads the tags marking lines that the author himself has indented; should that indented line exceed the character capacity of a screen, the run-over part of the line will be indented further, and all such runovers will look the same. This combination of appropriate coding choices and style sheets makes it easy to display poems with complex indentations, no matter if the lines are metered or free, end-stopped or enjambed.
Ultimately, there may be no way to account for every single variation in the way in which the lines of a poem are disposed visually on an electronic reading device, just as rare variations may challenge the conventions of the printed page, but with rigorous quality assessment and scrupulous proofreading, nearly every poem can be set electronically in accordance with its author’s intention. And in some regards, electronic typesetting increases our capacity to transcribe a poem accurately: In a printed book, there may be no way to distinguish a stanza break from a page break, but with an ereader, one has only to resize the text in question to discover if a break at the bottom of a page is intentional or accidental.
Our goal in bringing out poetry in fully reflowable digital editions is to honor the sanctity of line and stanza as meticulously as possible—to allow readers to feel assured that the way the lines appear on the screen is an accurate embodiment of the way the author wants the lines to sound. Ever since poems began to be written down, the manner in which they ought to be written down has seemed equivocal; ambiguities have always resulted. By taking advantage of the technologies available in our time, our goal is to deliver the most satisfying reading experience possible.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
These are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
EDITOR: Bradford Morrow
MANAGING EDITOR: Michael Bergstein
SENIOR EDITORS: Robert Antoni, Martine Bellen, Peter Constantine, Elaine Equi, Brian Evenson
ASSOCIATE EDITORS: Jedediah Berry, Jonathan Safran Foer, Catherine Kasper
PUBLICITY: Mark R. Primoff
WEBMASTERS: Brian Evenson, Michael Neff
EDITORIAL ASSISTANTS: Devin Irby, Rabia Sandage, Alan Tinkler
CONJUNCTIONS is published in the Spring and Fall of each year by Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY 12504. This issue of Conjunctions is made possible with the generous support of the National Endowment for the Arts and of the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.
Copyright © 2015 by
CONJUNCTIONS
Cover design by Jerry Kelly, New York. Photo collage by Michael Eastman.
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