Will someone please explain to me the logic of the (printed) poetry journal that runs into the hundreds of pages? Why the warehouse? What sort of reading experience are we being presented with? Are we to survey it as we would an anthology, dipping our toe every now and then? I ask as an editor who favors modesty, intimacy, and, well, some form of totality from his reading experience.
2 comments:
Last night, K. and M. and I were talking about whether online journals are supposed to "hang together" as a cohesive whole, when it's the nature of Internet readers to dip in and out, skip around, return, etc. It's not a linear but constellational experience, almost three-dimentional. Perhaps that's stretching it a bit, but I mean that I click from poem to contributor notes to my email, and back again. I'm talking about a different thing, online journals, but asking a similar question: how the creation is supposed to be taken in its totality.
Incidentally, Shampoo, I believe, orders its poems alphabetically, which suggests to me that it is to be considered, as you said about the big books, like an anthology.
I accept that explanation for an online magazine, even one, like Shampoo, organized alphabetically. I'm still not convinced in regards to hard copy journals.
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