Literary Notes
Begging your pardon for the me-ism of the first two items...
- My contributor's copy of American Literary Review arrived (!) and it was every bit as thrilling as I'd expected it to be.
- A poem written by Seth and dedicated to yours truly appears in AGNI 63.
- Andrew mister is a genius. Seriously. See "Liner Notes" in The Canary 5. He makes knocking the reader on her ass look easy. I've been toting this issue around in my bag to read whenever I have a few spare minutes. IMHO, a major flaw in Tony Hoagland's recent Poetry essay is that he's never seen an issue of The Canary.
- The 1st issue of PRACTICE: NEW WRITING + ART arrived in today's mail and looks very exciting. I'll have more to say as I get further into the issue, but my first impression is extremely positive. I'd describe it as being both experimental AND inviting—i.e. none of that chronic standoffishness one so often encounters in experimental projects. Rather the journal is organized in such a way as to offer readers a conscious and refreshing welcome. Don't let the bare bones website put you off. The journal itself is beautifully constructed, and printed by a company which won the award for "Most Environmentally Friendly Printer in Canada" in 2006.
Comments
I still have the copy of Partisan Review in which appeared my first published poem.
Posted by: C. Dale | April 21, 2006 06:41 PM
Fun. I'm beginning to value the perk of the contributor copy as much as the validation of publication itself, so much so I sometimes pass on sending to online journals just for the chance to get another print copy to read (not that I've received that many, mind you.)
Posted by: Troubadour | April 23, 2006 05:52 PM
Oh no, David! As the editor of an online publication I feel compelled to point out that it's six of one thing, a half dozen of the other. The poems in our magazine are not physical objects that one can possess, but our contributors get as much 'free' content as they would if we were in print. Plus:
* We've had close to 2,000 unique visitors in the past 30 days. We'd never be able to manage that kind of circulation as a small, independent print magazine.
* The work exists in perpetuity. It doesn't fall out of circulation with each new issue.
* The indexing done by Google and other search engines makes it possible for people to find our journal in a thousand different ways, whereas the information indexed by library catalogs tends to be very limited.
* We offer sound recordings of our poets!
Of course, there are still some reasons to prefer print, but I think of those as challenges for the future rather than a reason to avoid online publishing.
Finally...all the cool kids are doing it. ;-)
Posted by: Ginger | April 23, 2006 06:39 PM