Hey! Look Over There! And There!: The Issue of Multiple Posts

The end of 2009 is fast approaching, and I am excitedly working on a number of projects as we prepare to enter the new year. The PT podcast is still at large, but I hope it shall finally arrive in 2010. And I'm also preparing to pop up in a few other blogs and publications in the coming months.

With that said, there's a great story on poetry and tech over at the fantastic Vroman's Bookstore Blog. The article discusses the multi-platform lit mag Electric Literature, which we covered when it first debuted. Patrick, over at Vroman's, points out an issue involving Electric Literature and multiple posts. Here's a quick excerpt:

'The hope was that, by syndicating the story across so many different accounts, Electric Literature would reach a wider audience.

It didn’t work. There was too much overlap among the social networks of the various co-publishers, leading to many people seeing the same tweet several times. The book world has responded at first with confusion, and then moved quickly to anger, scorn and ridicule.'

Nothing like a little book-related tech drama to finish out the year. Be sure to check out the full article at Vroman's, in which Patrick digs deep into this issue.

Thanks to all of you for sticking with Paradise Tossed in 2009. We look forward to continuing to provide insights into the growing world of poetry and technology in the year to come. See you in 2010!

Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/spencerfinnley/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Haiku from Space!: Great Sources for SciFaiku

It's no secret that I'm very interested in the development of haiku as a genre. So it came as a surprise when I discovered, thanks to folks over at Self-Published Sci Fi, a whole branch of the genre that I'd never heard of before.

SciFaiku, a portmanteau word for Science Fiction haiku, is a genre that has its origins in a document known as The SciFaiku Manifesto, published in 1995 by Tom Brinck. The manifesto outlines that SciFaiku should adhere to the tradition rules of the Japanese poems, with one notable exception: their theme should be expanded from the natural world to the speculative and exciting world of Science Fiction.

At first, Sci-Fi and haiku may seem like a bit of an odd couple, but in practice it's a match made in heaven. The same sense of wonder that attends a great haiku exists in good science fiction. Here's a good example straight out of the manifesto:

Asteroids collide
without a sound...
We maneuver between fragments.

Since SciFaiku and the internet developed at roughly the same time, many of the best sources for this kind of poetry can be found online. Brinck's own website remains one of the best places to get examples of the genre as well as a more in-depth understanding of it. At the University of Michigan, Dan Horn has compiled an impressive database of SciFaiku reviews. Teri Santitoro and J. Alan Erwine over at Sam's Dot Publishing put out an amazing print and online magazine called SciFaikuest which covers the best new poems in the form, as well as similarly-themed tanka and haibun. And as always, Wikipedia provides a nice round-up of other sources for Scifaiku.

As someone completely new to this genre, I'm already becoming immersed in the available online material about SciFaiku. Hopefully, you too will allow this genre to open you up to new possibilities for haiku, and for poetry in general.

The Lit Mag Goes Mobile: "Electric Literature" Debuts Short Fiction for Your iPhone

In lieu of a longer reflection today, I'd like to draw your attention to some big news for poetry and lit, the mobile web, and this blog: Electric Literature has announced the creation of a bi-monthly electronic literary magazine.

The big news is that Electric Literature will be the first lit mag to be published to the iPhone, but I think the real gem here is that the publication will cross a number of media: there will be print, e-book [with a Kindle version specifically as well], and iPhone versions, with different pricing to subscribe to different versions of the mag.

This kind of cross-platform innovation really captures the zeitgeist of the literary world right now, which is why they're able to attract big name authors like Michael Cunningham. They lay out their whole raison d'etre in the About section of their site. [This is where they also, unfortunately, assert that the project will only include short fiction, at least for now. Here at PT we'll keep our fingers crossed for a poetry equivalent to come along soon!]

The makers of Electric Literature seem pretty confident that this is the direction most publications will be moving in the future, and I tend to agree, especially since they include the [albeit, more expensive] option of a print version. What do you think? Is this a portent of a mobile lit movement to come? Sound off in the comments.