Week 2

I apologize for the relative shortness of this post! My dad had surgery today, and I haven't had a lot of time for blogging, d'oh!

Source 1: Poetry Markets

Ooh, this is very useful! One of the most difficult and intimidating things, for me anyway, about writing poetry is trying to market it. I'm torn between two feelings: one is that I have no idea where to send my stuff, therefore there must not be anywhere to send it, and two is that there are entirely too many places to send it, so where on earth do I start?!

I have to admit, I wish that there were other ways to sort the markets than just paid/unpaid. Listing markets by genre would be incredibly helpful and would make it easier to find just the write publication for that strange bunch of space travel poems or whatever. However, having such a huge selection of markets makes for a bit of an adventure. I brought up all publications for the purpose of this entry, and chose three markets at random, just to check things out.

I like that the Poetry Markets site has information blurbs for each of the markets, even though some are short on solid info. It's nice to have direct links both to the market and the writers guidelines as well as a brief description of the market. Unfortunately, some of the links on the site are out of date; in order to still be useful to poets searching the web, the creator of Poetry Markets really should run through the links and remove or update anything that's out of date. But this is a very useful resource for anyone looking to get published.

Source 2: Deena Larsen's "A Quick Buzz"

I particularly like this part of Larsen's definition of e-poetry: "Defining electronic poetry (or e-poetry) is tricky. It's a moving target, changing at the same exponential rate that computers themselves change." That's a beautiful way to describe this emerging genre. Technology is changing at such an incredible rate; I don't have time to keep up with the new changes, but I am constantly amazed at the new things we can do with computers. I think it would be fascinating to do a survey of e-poetry from the advent of the genre on the internet to today, to see how the genre adapts to new trends on the internet, from early HTML to images to animations to Flash to CSS. I wonder where it will go next?

I found Robert Kendall's "A Study in Shades" to be a really great example of a symbiociative (great word!) image poem. I love how the small images at the top of the poem ("him" and "her") slowly changes with each new page of poetry. The images complement the words of the poem; they both illustrate the words and evoke the feeling of fading, of shifting from one mode of existence to another.

I'm particularly interested in the idea of hiding poems within games, as in Jennifer Ley's "War Games" as well as the other visual poems on The Bee Hive. I know nothing about animating in Flash, but I think that creating poems that are completely interactive is a pretty cool idea. The round robin interactive poetry on the Electronic Literature Organization site is a familiar idea to me, at least in the form of fiction. I've never really participated in round robin fiction in online communities, much less poetry, but the end results are interesting to me.

Source 3: Riding the Meridian

The site itself reminds me very much of the Matrix films, aesthetically. The use of binary code in the header graphic as well as the choice of colors is very evocative of the dystopian cyberpunk world created in the Matrix. It looks like this site hasn't been updated in several years, unfortunately. Some of the e-poems on the site seem primitive in terms of today's graphics, but as I said, the site hasn't been updated in years.

Diane Caney's "Unhelmeted" is particularly evocative. I love the images that accompany Caney's poem, and the way that she lays the words out on the page gives the white space a lot of power. I love poets who aren't afraid of white space (or black space, as is the case for several of the pages in this poem). I don't think it's necessary to fill up the whole page or stick to a strictly prescribed format for poems (i.e. everything lined up neatly along the left margin).

I was disappointed to find that Riding the Meridian is closed to new submissions and has been for the past five years. I would love to see new works in this genre. I'm hoping I'll find an active, up-to-date e-poetry site soon.