Art via The Poetry Foundation

A few weeks ago on this blog and then in the pages of PW, we had some discussion about the issues facing poetry publishers as they move into the digital arena.  Since then, this blogger talked to Alizah Salario at the Poetry Foundation–she also talked to a host of other poetry folks, including folks at publishers BOA Editions, Copper Canyon Press, Coffee House, as well as distributor Consortium. She also checked in with Bud Parr, one of the techies we spoke to for our article. In the resulting story, Salario goes into great depth and includes some helpful illustrations that explain why poetry is so hard to turn into e-books, and also lets publishers and poets sound off on why it’s worth doing anyway.

Here’s a little excerpt, and then you should go read the whole article:

All the aspects of the poem—including irregular line breaks, indentations, and spaces (essentially, all the nuances that make a poem a poem)—must be described in a language the e-reader understands. So the markup language describes what the text is—the title, the epigraph, the text body of the poem, and so on—and the cascading style sheet (otherwise known as the CSS) tells the e-reader how to display what the markup language describes. The problem for ePub, the Kindle, and poetry is that the markup language doesn’t have the vocabulary to describe the minutiae of poetry.