First, the background. Slog, the weblog for Seattle's weekly The Stranger, have been running a "poetry chain". It's fairly simple: poets were nominated, one was selected. A selected poem would be posted on Slog, and the poet would select his or her successor for the next link in the chain. The effect is after starting at an arbitrary point (the first poet selected), recommendations on poetry are being offered by poets. Incidentally, John Marshall was the most recent link in the chain. Not that his name means that much to me. But here's the poem, and an example of the issue: Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! (Via Slog) Paul Constant, The Stranger's literary critic, acknowledged a problem with the poetry chain: (Special note for the commenter who was complaining several weeks ago about the formatting of the poems. I use jpegs of the poems so that I don't screw up anyone's formatting. But you are right it's awful that seeing-impaired people can't enjoy the poetry, and so I am copying the text of the poem and inserting it into the comments of this post. It hadn't occurred to me and I apologize.) Text formatting, such as for poetry is especially difficult in HTML. It requires a lot of extraneous fillers to place the words correctly. For instance, I wouldn't know how to begin formatting e. e. cummings' "im(cat)mo" (or "im(cat)mo/b,i;l:e"), which, while I must confess I am obliged to disagree with the great William Carlos Williams on this point, is an excellent poem. I literally would have to dig out a printed copy, take a photograph of or scan the page, and post that. The placement of the letters themselves on the page is absolutely vital, and they're all over the place; the most prominent explanation is that cummings treated words on the page like objects in a painting. (Interestingly enough, although a bit of digression, if you apply the proper poetry editing marks—which are different from proofreading marks for prose—the first line of the poem turns into a picture of a cat.) But Mr. Constant's commenter is correct; presenting poetry in image form, such as he has, presents challenges for the visually impaired; their computer cannot necessarily read the words. The thing is that with hypertext markup and its derivatives/successors, there are still some things that make proper writing difficult. For instance, it is proper to place a single blank space after a period or semicolon, but two blank spaces after a full stop. You wouldn't know that from reading web content, though, since HTML can only manage one blank space at a time. Indeed, this is one of the greatest difficulties in properly presenting certain poetry. It goes beyond poetry, too. Rules and traditional conventions of writing in the English language have certain purpose. There was a time, for instance, when there were no full stops. The convention came about because it was useful. To the other, somewhere in Lynne Truss' Eats Shoots & Leaves, she discusses a notion raised in earlier centuries that eventually the written language would be presented not only with capital letters, commas, full-stops, interrogatives, ellipses, italics, boldface, and such, but also variable colors and sizes, each meaning certain things. To the one, we're well on the way to that. To the other, though, it's also getting harder and harder to understand what people mean. Language is, of course, dynamic, but to what degree would we call a decrease in utility the evolution of language? That is, while language is dynamic, shouldn't its changes enhance its value in relation to its purpose? That is, shouldn't the changes make the language more clear? It would be a shame, I think, if the next major conventional shift in written English was a degradation to suit the needs of companies trying to make money off the internet. HTML and the like are great, but they're still insufficient. On the one hand, I might appeal to the software geniuses to fix its shortcomings in presenting the written word for both aesthetic and communicative reasons, but beyond that, yes, it would make a huge difference if, for instance, one did not need to tag something in order to compel the computer to display more than one blank horizontal space at a time. But I think that, as far as the visually impaired are concerned, we should expect to see in the near future software that is much better at dealing with words in pictures. ____________________ Notes: Constant, Paul. "Seattle Poetry Chain 19: John Marshall". Slog. April 3, 2009. TheStranger.com. Accessed April 5, 2009. http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2009/04/03/seattle-poetry-chain-19-john-marshall
