I was lucky enough to be sent John Kinsella’s Armour by Mark Antony Owen, back when the kerfuffle over the TS Eliot Prize still seemed like it might be something important. It has been reviewed quite comprehensively (see links at the bottom of this post), but I wanted to use it to put down some thoughts about scale, within the space of a poem & within the space of the collection. I fear that much of this is going to seem negative, when I think Kinsella to be a very talented & thoughtful poet, & Armour is an accomplished & rewarding collection. Nevertheless, it provides some interesting examples for language, metaphor, & the space of the collection.
January 2012
Formatting Poetry for Kindle (with OEBPS Template)
n.b. The possibilities for Kindle formatting have been increased with the introduction of KF8, although at present these options are only available on the Kindle Fire. It is uncertain how this will affect e-ink Kindle devices. Fixed layout would (in theory) remove the problem of Kindle-broken lines, but we are not quite there yet. This guide works on the assumption of reflowable lines, with as much consistency across Kindle devices (Kindle Fire, Kindle readers, & Kindle for iPad & iPhone) as possible. Different screen sizes/resolutions causes some problems here, but we shall do the best we can. I will work on a post on what the new KF8 formatting options could do for poetry, & how we can work with better html markup & css media queries to improve backwards compatibility.
Contact me if you have any suggestions or comments. (Thanks to @tadaja & @cdcasey for some proof-reading & suggestions.)
Introduction
The Kindle is not kind to poetry. For those who want to self-publish their poetry on Kindle, formatting your poems is a gloomy prospect, & one that requires reducing your expectations. If you want your poetry ebook to look at least acceptable, the best chance is by doing the conversion to mobi yourself. The workflow which allows the most hands-on control is to create your ebook in oebps format (a predecessor of epub), & use Kindlegen to convert & package your files into a mobi ebook. This is not as difficult as it sounds, & this guide will go through the process step-by-step, along with code examples and a full sample ebook of some of Shakespeare’s sonnets. Teaching you about basic html, css & xml is not a part of this guide, as you can find enough about this elsewhere. The knowledge required for putting together an ebook is very small, & you should be able to see most of what you need from the example code.
Some Points for the Future of the Poetry Ebook
Not all of the future possibilities of digital publishing are applicable to poetry. (This is speaking about the poetry book once finished, not about how that book could go through the process of publication. For more on the latter idea, see my post about a hypothetical model for a poetry publisher, wherein the publisher essentially works as an API for readers/consumers to create a poetry book based on their own criteria.) It is useful to trim down these speculative possibilities to look at how the ideal poetry ebook, with its particular requirements, might look (outside of present platforms or devices, although much would be possible within the EPUB3 spec.).
Poetry Calendar 2012
Here is a list of poetry-related events & dates for the coming year. Please help me fill it in.