1.
Poetry in the Age of
Information
Presented at the O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing Conference,
Chicago
April 9, 2012
Catherine Halley
Director of Digital Programs
The Poetry Foundation
@cathyhalley

2.
Poetry Foundation Mission
The Poetry Foundation, publisher of
Poetry magazine, is an independent
literary organization committed to a
vigorous presence for poetry in our
culture. It exists to discover and celebrate
the best poetry and to place it before the
largest possible audience.

3.
Poetry Foundation Digital Portfolio

4.
poetryfoundation.org
• Poetry magazine online + full digital archive
• Curated online-only archive of 20K poems, 3K
poet bios
• Audio poems/podcasts we produce
• Feature articles & educational resources
• Blog aggregates poetry news
• Distribute content created with partners

5.
Poetry Out Loud
Website

6.
POETRY Mobile App

7.
Poetry in the
Information Age

8.
Challenges
• Readers Have Shorter Attention Spans
• Dominance Of Visual Culture
• Layout Varies with Screen Size
• Internet Noise Makes It Difficult To Discover New Poems

9.
Short Attention Spans
http://www.geekosystem.com/social-media-ruins-minds-infographic/

10.
Visual Culture
Words as Captions

11.
Poems Meant to Look Like
This…

12.
Sometimes Look Like
This…

13.
“Poems” Search Volume
Down

14.
Even Robert Frost Doesn’t
Fare Well

15.
The Bad News?
• There’s not much we can do about these cultural
shifts.
• The proliferation of content and information is
not going to stop.
• Poetry will continue to compete for attention with
Angry Birds and Pinterest.
• AND IT WILL CONTINUE TO THRIVE.

16.
Just Ask Don Patterson!
If you burned every poem on the planet and you
wiped every poem from every human mind, you
would have poetry again by tomorrow afternoon.
– The Guardian

17.
OR, the Conceptual
& Flarf Poets
Kenny Goldsmith, conceptual poet
• Traffic: Prints 1010Wins radio broadcasts as
poems
• The Day: Reprints New York Times from 9/11 as a
poem
Flarf
• use search terms to generate poems

18.
The Effects
REACH EXPANDS EXPONENTIALLY
• unique visitors + 300% in 3 yrs
OVERALL ENGAGEMENT IS DOWN
• time people spend on the site is down
SURPRISING TRAFFIC SPIKES
• social media effect: Stumbled Upon, etc.

19.
Surprises
e.e. cummings:
[i carry your heart with me(i carry it in]

20.
Given this
landscape…
What do we do?

21.
Resolve Layout Issues

22.
A poem is part visual art,
part text, but the internet
is designed to handle all
text as prose, and wraps
text accordingly.
Long lines don’t work well
on small screens.
We use hanging indents
for long lines.
But Facebook, some
RSS readers, and some
email clients strip these
characters so it’s hard to
preserve formatting.

23.
Break Through Noise on
Internet
1. Pursue potential poetry readers where they
already congregate.
• Partnerships – strength in numbers
• Use social media strategically
2. Make browsing more fun
3. Develop smart metadata

24.
Pin a Quote Share
Button
Example: Use Social Media Strategically

25.
In case I can’t connect my
iPad…

26.
Mobile App
Serves several purposes:
1. Brings people poems where they live: makes
it accessible to wider audience
2. Fun “spin” browsing feature & share function
encourages interactivity with the poems
3. Mood categories/metadata for poems
Let me demonstrate!

27.
Digital Access to
Poetry Magazine

28.
JSTOR Archive On Our Site

29.
Poetry magazine on the iPad

30.
Read PDF in iBooks

31.
On the Horizon
Platform agnostic digital subscriptions to the
magazine?
Single digital issue sales?

32.
Calliope
Poem Recommendation
Engine
• Pandora for poems
• Engine that identifies poem neighbors based on
attributes that take the materiality of the language
into account
• Treats poems as data

33.
Conclusion
• Create great content
• Plan to feed the data beast : treat content (poems)
as data
• Give up control: you can’t game social media, not
really
• Be willing to be surprised