Digital chaos. Craig Morgan Teicher explains in a blog posting for Publisher’s Weekly just what went down, in his story “This Is Not Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Howl.'” (regrettably, no longer available on line). NPR also ran the story, and, shortly after that, Teicher did a follow-up in Publisher’s Weekly offering some possible solutions for the very tricky prospect of the formatting of poetry in the digital world. The story also caught the eye of the University of Texas’ Digital Curation blog (must be the dept of Digital Curation?) “Poetry Needs Curation Too.” ( We couldn’t agree more!)
In the long-ago days of the typewriter, the first thing we’d do was to send out Allen’s “Instructions for Typesetting”, which we include below for your amusement & which we sent to Amazon. It’s doubtful they’d be much use in the world of internet code & formatting, but we’ll find out soon enough if they help Amazon sort Allen’s formatting issues.
