You Can't Kindle A Poem

Blasted Line Breaks!

Anything we can do to keep Kindle out of business, we’re happy to do it.  Luckily, poems will not want to pursue Kindle. They will look in the mirror and see an unflattering, distorted version of their resplendent bodies. The deliberate placement of words, line breaks and stanzas cannot be restored once converted to the digital reader. Is anyone appalled by this? Yes, Billy Collins. When he decided to download his most recent collection on Kindle he was not happy:

“I found that even in a very small font that if the original line is beyond a certain length, they will take the extra word and have it flush left on the screen, so that instead of a three-line stanza you actually have a four-line stanza. And that screws everything up.”

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