Poetry's public display

Lawrence, MA--The Frost Foundation has begun a yearlong effort to transform this portion of the Lawrence Library into a gallery that presents the legacy of Robert Frost's early poems. The display flickers the image of XJ Kennedy presenting his memories of Robert Frost.

Enigmatic

The electronic book: enigmatic medium for poetry

Setting a book in type: a river runs through it

Making a book of Seamus Heaney's 2002 Frost reading and lecture has put me in the printer's catbird seat again. It has been years since I set a book in metal type or used the latest page making tools. So I bought a font of type and then tried to find a tool that allowed text to flow through the pages (as Quark and others had perfected), that also allowed one to fix the rivers streams and rivulets that developed in the type, and finally that allowed the minor jiggering that a book always needs-- usually at the last minute. That tool turned out to be right on my computer, Publisher 2003. The other tools that complement my bookmark tool box are pdfFactory, Adobe Reader, Hewlett Packard's manual print utilities. All of these tools handle digital type well.

With luck and loose ends tied up, that book should be available in the first quarter of 2008 in time for the New England Poetry Conference at UMass Lowell on Feb 27. Bookmaking is now such a pleasurable process with fine tools available on almost every laptop.

The electronic book as a medium for poetry

In the last few days of Autumn 2007 several friends who are scholars, teachers, and librarians have asked me my opinion of electronic books. They were mainly thinking of the new device from Amazon, but it turns out that they and I had other kinds of electronic books in mind. At least three of us had ordered the XO laptop, giving one to a child in a developing country and getting one for home. I haven't laid a hand on either the Kindle or the XO but my general opinion is that the laptop and the palm pilot are the best electronic book available for poetry today. Neither surpasses the paper book but both are gaining ground as a medium for poetry.