RING #3: Columns/Interviews/Reviews

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!

An interview with January O’Neil, Big Tent Poetry Sideshow Barker

One of our sideshow barkers, January O’Neil, is featured currently in 10 questions: poetry & technology (an interview series by Nic Sebastian at Very Like a Whale).

When I started blogging, I had an infant and a toddler—and I probably wasn’t sleeping. Needless to say, I couldn’t drop everything to attend a weekly writers’ workshop. So technology made it possible to share poems and get critiques that eventually helped me publish my first book. Technology makes poetry accessible.

One of the neat things about this series at Very Like a Whale is that a number of our Sideshow Barkers are included, as well as other folks we read regularly. Ren Powell has been featured, and Dave Bonta’s responses are coming soon, and be sure to read the entire series.

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!

An interview with Ren Powell, Big Tent Poetry Sideshow Barker

10 questions: poetry & technology (an interview series by Nic Sebastian at Very Like a Whale)

I love that language can be presented on the page with clauses that have to be seen and connected in the mind, that a metaphor about grief can hover in a collection until it is completed twenty pages later in a poem about a dog. But there was a time when Scandinavian poets used complicated meters and they could make those kinds of wonderful epic artworks through memory and aural performance. We’ve lost that, as poets and as audience members. We will certainly lose something of Poetry along the way. I expect we will have a newly defined form of Poetry through which to express our grief.

One of the neat things about this series at Very Like a Whale is that a number of our Sideshow Barkers are included, as well as other folks we read regularly. Look for January O’Neil and Dave Bonta’s responses soon, and be sure to read the entire series.

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!