12 May 2009

Poetry does have a future

Doug LeMoine has been using the Kindle software on his iPhone, and has made an interesting discovery.
If I were a derivatives man, I’d go to the Chicago Board of Trade and buy up some poetry futures. Sell frozen orange juice and pork bellies; buy poetry. Why? Because it is the perfect product for small screen reading. People are reading more and more stuff on smaller and smaller screens, everyone knows this, duh.
Me, I've been reading The Three Musketeers using Stanza. You'd think that would make me disagree with Mr LeMoine, but actually it's the opposite: I'm enjoying Dumas because it's picaresque and I can nibble away at it. As I quoted Warren Ellis saying a while back, the form factor of your reading matters.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

I am now rereading Midnight's Children, which takes so much focus that it makes me long for flash fiction, sestinas, and blog posts. I do not remember having that feeling the first time I read it.

I don't even have a kindle.