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Poetry, E-Books, and John Ashbery

Gilgamesh's tablet 11 never looked so good.
Gilgamesh’s tablet 11 never looked so good.

There’s an article in today’s New York Times called “Line by Line, E-Books Turn Poet-Friendly.”  In it, Alexandra Alter reports that even though “[m]ost e-readers mangle the line breaks and stanzas that are so crucial to the appearance and rhythm of poetry” publishers of poetry are starting to do a better job preserving the integrity of the line as they remediate print books into digital form.

Last week, for example, Open Road Media published 17 digital collections of John Ashbery’s poetry, “the first time the bulk of his poetry will be available in e-book form.”  In contrast, Ecco attempted to put out four Ashbery e-books three years ago and “[t]here were no line breaks, and the stanzas had been jammed together into a block of text that looked like prose.”

Check out Open Road’s promo video for Ashbery below:

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