[Realpoetik] News for You

[RealPoetik Magazine]

Dear RealPoetik Subscribers:

RealPoetik will be taking an end-of-summer hiatus to regroup and rethink the
format of the journal.  Below you will find some thoughts about how the
journal might function differently.  Think of it as a call for submissions
in the guise of informal notes.

As an example of how one might use the journal’s form differently, please
find a supplement to this email at RealPoetik <http://www.realpoetik.org>,
our original handwritten notes on this subject, taken in the car between
Boston and Harpswell, Maine.

Thanks for supporting RealPoetik!

Yours,

Lily and Claire


CB:
I’ve become overwhelmed and unimpressed by email.  I want email to be
better.  I want to talk to it or have my brain to respond, so my fingers
don’t have to.  Often I respond in my head but never send the email.

Lots of services let us communicate instantaneously and for free without the
“formalities” of an email, but email continues to be super useful and pretty
necessary to interact and function in the U.S.  Having constant access to my
email changes my relationship to it further.  When I want to be distracted,
notice I have an email, then see it’s just a fare sale from American
Airlines, I feel sad.  Maybe you feel sad when RealPoetik comes and it’s
just RealPoetik again.

Lately we published a couple of poems that had tricky formatting, and we
were able to publish the poems as images, not text.  Our internet assistant,
Jenny Wickens, suggested we use a Google Labs feature that allows the image
to be part of the email, not merely attached.  I think more images should be
a part of RP.

LB:
Like Claire, I sometimes feel ambivalent about my relationship to email,
social networking, poetry on the internet, etc.  I worry that there’s so
much poetry online, I don’t read it carefully when I do decide to read it.
 Maybe I bring what tends to be a distracted attention to the internet to
the poems I read online.

We’d like to explore our questions about the web and email as ways of
disseminating  and enjoying poetry by using the form of the journal
differently for the next several months.  Perhaps by using the listserv and
website in new ways, we can rethink and revise some of our ideas about
reading and viewing poetry online.

What would you like to see in your weekly email from RealPoetik?  Do you
have a piece that takes the form of the journal into account in a different
way?  Is there a video or image that you would like to see accompanying your
poem on the RealPoetik website?  Did you write a poem in response to a work
of art you saw, an article you read, a trip you took, something your dog
did?

Perhaps there is some way to present a poem alongside its point of origin
(no matter how much the poem and this point diverged along the way) that
might be productive or thought-provoking, and that might take the writing
process into account.  I tend to be obsessed with process, and it might be
interesting for future RealPoetik emails/postings to present process in
various ways.

You might even send an image of a hand-written draft of your poem, and that
could accompany your poem somehow (this would be sort of like what the print
journal LUNGFULL! does), and what we’ve posted on the website as a corollary
to this email).  There are probably lots of ideas we haven’t thought of, and
we’re open to submissions of work that would use the journal’s form in new
ways.

CB:
Maybe instead of a poem, your RP contribution would be an email introduction
to a video you made that we then post on the website.  Maybe it’s a photo
email that links to a poem on the website.  Maybe it would be exciting to be
an email subscriber to RP and get something special that is not on the
website (I don’t want us to be the company that makes you sign up to get
special coupons then bothers you with emails that aren’t coupons; we are
promising no coupons).

If one day you opened your RP email and it was way more awesome than most
email in some way, if it somehow helped make email better, that would be
nice.

-- 
RealPoetik
www.realpoetik.org
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