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.”

What Mr. Collins means when he says “it messes everything up” is that it fucks everything up and poetry should not be fucked with. If poetry is not compatible with the Kindle, we don’t see this as a problem since reading a book of poetry should be as enjoyable as reading a book of poetry — you  know, tactile pleasures included like spilling coffee on it, getting the damned thing back from an ex, dropping it in the toilet, drying it out — those pages do bring out the poetic charm. And while other genres slip into Kindle with ease and finesse maybe it’s a really good thing that poetry isn’t a priority for e-publishers. We’re all for killing trees in the name of poetry. So to answer The Huffington Post article’s main question of whether we’re okay with just buying a volume of poetry from our neighborhood bookstore, we say yes. And would we want our poems published (err raped) in the Kindle format? Again, we say no. That would be as distasteful as wearing a dress over jeans — don’t go there.

– Lori Huskey

Video: Kill The Kindle