Christopher Louvet, the editor and publisher of Floating Wolf Quarterly, talks to Scott Geiger about the electronic past, present, and future of poetry.

 

 

In discussing the Tranströmer Nobel win last month on The New York Times Book Review Podcast, Julie Bosman notes the absence of any electronic editions of the Swedish laureate’s work. “I’m pretty sure they don’t exist,” she tells Sam Tanenhaus. “Poetry is often not released in digital form because the formatting is complex and difficult. A lot of publisher’s just don’t bother, especially because a lot of people, when they buy a book of poetry, they want to keep in on their shelf, they don’t want to read it on their black and white Kindle.”

Is there really no electronic future for poetry? One emerging digital publication has addressed both challenges cited by Bosman in one take. Launched in June 2010, Floating Wolf Quarterly pairs the chapbook (between 8 and 12 poems) of an emerging poet with one from an established poet. The FWQ site is tidy and minimal, and it displays identically across browsers, mobile devices, and tablet computers. Though its functionality is optimized for the iPad and iPhone, where navigation between poems is by a sweep of the finger. All formatting of the poets’ lines is carefully preserved and consistent across platforms. Kindle editions of individual chapbooks are available on Amazon.

Behind Floating Wolf Quarterly is poet and programmer Christopher Louvet, who responded in writing from his home in Miami Beach, Florida to the following queries about the future of poetry and a literary artist’s opportunities in the age of electronic literature.

Scott Geiger Congratulations on your sixth installment of Floating Wolf Quarterly. I wonder if you can tell me what you think FWQ is. I know it’s an electronic literary publication, but beyond that, is it a website? An app? An e-book?

Christopher Louvet I’m not sure I think much about it. FWQ, for me, is a digital quarterly cruising leisurely in the express lane. “App” would be a stretch because FWQ’s only function is to serve content. That the FWQ website responds to your device—desktop, mobile, tablet—doesn’t qualify it for app status. If I called it an app, I’d simply be trading on the novelty of that word. Compare FWQ to Amazon’s Kindle Cloud Reader, for example. I was pretty pleased—vindicated, even—by Kindle Cloud Reader’s reading interface when it was announced this past August; some of the decisions they made have obvious resemblances to choices I made with FWQ. But Kindle Cloud Reader, because it relies on the end user to fill it out with texts and because it enables offline reading, is much more clearly an app. More obviously, “The Waste Land” app [published by Faber and Touch Press earlier this year] is clearly an app, with a host of additional materials surrounding and informing the poem. An e-book? If you broaden your definition of e-book, then sure, it’s an e-book. If you’d rather constrain the definition, then each FWQ chapbook is an e-book, at present for Kindle only.

SG You have closely considered the experience of reading on-screen. What inspired you to create Floating Wolf Quarterly?

CL I was inspired by the ideas bandied about after the iPad was announced but before it was available. BERG and Bonnier R&D produced an early conceptual video for Mag+, the engine behind the Popular Science iPad app, and it was clear that reading experiences would change with the introduction of the iPad, in a way that differed significantly from the impact e-readers had already made.

Around the same time, still before the iPad had been released, Craig Mod wrote an essay called Books in the Age of the iPad. He made a great distinction between formless content (essentially prose) and definite content (“texts composed with images, charts, graphs or poetry”) and the universal container—the iPad—that would hold them. “In the context of the book as an object, the key difference between Formless and Definite Content is the interaction between the content and the page,” Mod says. “Formless Content doesn’t see the page or its boundaries. Whereas Definite Content is not only aware of the page, but embraces it.”

I write poetry, and of course I read a lot of poetry. I want to enjoy reading poetry on my iPad, Kindle, or computer. So with all the excitement around the iPad, I decided I wanted to build something around poetry.

Poetry published online then was and is still very much today stuck in the single poem per page mode. You get a single poem, maybe even two or three by one author per page, but they’re all lumped together in the same place. The poems have no breathing room. Entire journals are published this way, especially with the move away from print, which means the journals have no continuity between poems. In other words, while a lot of really interesting technological developments have occurred, poetry online is stuck in the 1990s. I thought there could be a different way of doing things, a different way to conceive of the poem on the “page,” one that’s much more aware of the container and its constraints.

SG Is this the first electronic publication that you’ve designed and edited? Were there any beta versions of FWQ? Ideas that you maybe threw out along the way?

CL I was an assistant poetry editor for the now shuttered Blue Moon Review. I also did the production work to format the poems for the web, but I had nothing to do with the design.

FWQ as it is now is how I originally envisioned it, plus or minus minor details, and I built toward that vision over time. Its “bezel” owes a clear debt to the iPad, and I always thought of the poems as existing on a horizontal axis, much as the BERG video and Mod’s essay suggest. But there’s always room for improvement. Android support, for example, is nonexistent at the moment, and there are ways of making Internet Explorer behave better. At one point, I thought about offering PDFs of each chapbook. I decided that was unnecessary.

SG If I were to introduce a new poet to you, giving you their very exciting first published work, and I could either send you the electronic file or give you the book off my shelf, which would you prefer and why?

CL First, I’d express my surprise that an electronic copy of a first book of poetry existed. Then I’d ask for both, if you were offering them. Books, and all our fetishizations of and associations with them, aren’t going away just because you can now pack an entire library in your pocket.

I’d want both for two simple reasons: First, frequently, the formatting of digitalized poetry is suspect, and even if that were not the case I’d want to see how the publisher dealt with poetry’s specific requirements. Second, sometimes I just want to turn actual pages, not flick animated simulacra or refresh e-ink. But preferences can be practical too. The “library in your pocket” travels better.

 

 

SG Why chapbooks? That format is so closely linked to very economical print-media publishing. Why frame Floating Wolf Quarterly in that way when there’s this almost blue-sky scope for electronic publishing?

CL I knew I wanted to produce a poetry journal, but I also knew I wanted to provide more than one or two poems from several authors; plenty of magazines, online and off, already do that. The chapbook gives readers an extended stay inside a poet’s vision and voice, but it’s also short enough that the reader’s not encumbered. You can’t, for example, dash off a reading of an entire chapbook, but it also won’t require a couple hours. It’s a happy medium, and, considering the Internet’s attention span, that’s important.

The chapbook is economical for me too, in that FWQ is a one-man shop. I don’t have the time to chase down the multiple contributors or read the unsolicited submissions a more traditional literary magazine format would require. And then there’s cover art to design.

I do take advantage of the “blue sky” of electronic publishing, though: I ask contributors for 8-12 poems, no page limit.

SG I understand that you do not accept unsolicited manuscripts. Do you meet your contributors on the street? At AWP? What’s your editorial vision for the magazine?

CL I had a number of conversations with Campbell McGrath when I was beginning to understand what FWQ could be. Deciding on the chapbook format naturally led to discussions about contributors, and, frankly, one chapbook each quarter isn’t enough of a draw. More than two is too much. Again, the balance is important, and the idea of pairing new and established voices coincided nicely. Readers get introduced to a new poet they should be reading anyway, if he or she were more widely published, when they come to read an established author’s chapbook. Each new writer benefits from the audiences of the established poets. That’s the general pitch.

As to who appears in FWQ, much of that is now organically driven, with contributors suggesting contributors, or one side of an edition bringing along the other. I fill in the gaps.

I’ve never been to AWP.

SG Who is the audience for Floating Wolf Quarterly? Is it identical to literary journals or slightly different and more ambitious because now everyone can get to it online?

CL I wouldn’t say FWQ has a specific intended audience, though one can certainly tell the joke about only poets reading poetry. Anyone who wants to read it is welcome to it, and it’s nice to have a global distribution channel.

SG You have Kindle-ready chapbooks for sale on Amazon. Why offer to sell the chapbooks, too, if you can get to them for free online?

CL The question should be, “Why should I buy an FWQ chapbook if I can get it for free online?” I don’t have a definitive answer. Because you enjoyed reading it and want to support FWQ?

You can find any number of examples of people giving things away online while simultaneously repackaging the same content for sale. Cory Doctorow gives away some of his books as PDFs and you can buy them in print. 37Signals constructed a New York Times bestseller, Rework, from posts on their blog, Signals vs. Noise. They sold their first book, Getting Real, also a collection of blog posts wrapped into a PDF, to great success and are now giving it away too. Even Poetry magazine now publishes full issues online.

The state of poetry in e-book formats is pretty poor, but the reasons amount to little more than laziness. To digitalize a poem, you actually have to consider typesetting and variable font sizes. You have to think about how lines respond when the typeface is suddenly twice as large within the same physical container. You have to indent long lines, manage dropped lines, and account for line breaks. It’s not easy, and I certainly haven’t examined every kink, but it’s not as impossible as the lack of poetry e-books might lead one to believe. Where, for example, are the Tomas Tranströmer e-books? Why is my iBooks version of Robert Hass’s The Apple Trees at Olema, which is a great collection, so cringe-worthy to look at?

The short answer is that I converted the chapbooks to the Kindle format as a challenge to myself, with good results. I also created versions of Eliot’s “The Waste Land” and Whitman’s 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass because free versions on Amazon aren’t worth the time it takes to click the button to send them to your device. Nearly all free poetry e-books look like prose.

While one issue is the conversion process and its ensuing formatting mishaps, a bigger problem seems to be how publishers of poetry haven’t yet adapted to e-books in the most obvious way. Using the Robert Hass collection as an example, the print version positions each poem on its own page, the common method of publishing poetry. The superb prose poem “A Story About the Body” begins and ends on the same page, and no other poem occupies that page. In the iBooks version, depending on your chosen font size, the preceding and following poems cram the whitespace in a way reminiscent of Norton anthologies. That design element is a fundamental flaw in poetry’s electronic presentation.

If you think of the poem as the “page” on an electronic device, the natural unit of measurement, which is essentially what most poetry books do now, reading poetry on that device suddenly becomes a lot more enjoyable. The length of the 1855 Leaves of Grass becomes 12 poems, not however many pages.

I see no reason why the e-book versions shouldn’t be for sale. If anything, I should be charging for subscription access to the website, but that becomes a question of marketability. I want as many people as possible to read FWQ’s chapbooks.

SG You’re a poet yourself; you hold an MFA. But I understand that you are, professionally, a programmer and information systems manager. Can you talk a little bit about this? How do you see the changing economy affecting literary artists? Both in terms of technology and financial infrastructure (i.e., How do you make a living?), what are the challenges and opportunities?

CL The opportunities are endless, and the challenge is single: carving out time to write. It would be lovely to be paid to write and produce FWQ, but that’s highly unlikely to happen. It would also be a little boring.

One of the difficulties involved in making art is that you need to be in a particular sustained environment even to make the creative act possible. If it’s not available or doesn’t exist, you have to build it yourself. That takes a lot of work. The trick, in my experience, is to find the job that pays you to live the way you want to live while doing something you enjoy, and while also giving you time and space to write. For some, that’s teaching. For me, it’s computer work. I’m always bemused when people are surprised there can be intersections between technology and writing. One does not exclude the other.

SG Any guess on what happens to literary innovation in a world where technology evolves so rapidly? Do you write a twenty-first century Cantos? Do you conceptualize a new platform for publishing or reading? Or do you do both simultaneously

CL Apple, with iOS, has already done all that really hard work in terms of platform. You just need to learn your new basic unit and go from there. The chances are pretty great that you’re not learning anything new, just stripping away things.

But where’s the Electric Literature for poetry? It’d be nice if poetry publishers, particularly the journals, built apps where the focus was on reading poems, period. Everything else—any social network integration you can think of, for example—is superfluous. Who knows, maybe those apps are under development now, maybe Poetry has a skunkworks unit tucked away somewhere in Chicago.

People will continue to write, and people will continue to read. Neither needs reinvention. The innovations will come less from insertions of various media into text or other new-fangled presentations and more from language that addresses technological changes directly in lyric and narrative.

SG Can you give a forecast as to FWQ’s upcoming year?

CL Edition #7 will feature Michael Hettich and Carol Todaro. After that, Joe Wenderoth and someone he’s bringing along, and then Mark Bibbins and Alex Dimitrov. Other writers are under consideration.

 

Scott Geiger’s fiction has appeared in the Pushcart Prize anthology and on exhibit at Storefront for Art and Architecture.