Sideshow: How To Format Poetry On The Web
Dave Bonta, Big Tent Poetry Sideshow Barker
Dave Bonta has a series at his blog, Via Negativa, that focuses on Poetics and Technology. The latest installation is about how to format poetry on the Web (your blog — or your journal for that matter!) if you want to do special things with long lines, indentations, extra spaces or what not. The subtitle to the post is “An Incomplete Guide” and while it may not be exhaustive, the work to compile it was exhausting, and it is a heck of a start to help poets make the art they want to make. Or to play with new tools!
As Dave says, “HTML is not particularly poetry-friendly, and special measures are required to preserve a lot of the formatting which an earlier technology, the typewriter, made all too easy.”
Click on the excerpt to read the entire article. Check our About page for a list of other Sideshow Barkers, friends of Big Tent Poetry who are generous enough to share with us their columns, interviews and reviews. There is no set schedule for these appearances; willy-nilly is a symptom of creative genius!