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Originally Posted by Adele Ward
Poetry is tricky in ebooks and taking off slowly. I wonder if people would like it better if it came with a free audiobook with the poet reading.
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Of course not. Reading aloud, who needs that? They should sing it like everyone else.
You know, they call it lyrics now to sung poetry and just poetry to the written kind, but back in the times of Homer, it was just poetry and it was sung and oral tradition was the only way of recording it. Then came written word and out was written down, but such a system for recording the melodies and rhythm was not yet devised, so the music was lost. Then came the press and music notation, and it was possible to record both the music and the words, but it came too late and already a tradition of written poetry alone had formed. Then came a funny irony: sound recording. It was possible now to record both the music and an oral presentation without even needing to write anything down in weird symbols. So it's possible to simply listen to Homer himself singing or rapping his epics along while academics keep themselves busy deciphering old symbols from clay tablets or e-papyr.
In other words, the written language is merely a historical accident and we've got now much better recording means with automatic reading for us.
Thus I hope poets put some more effort to entertain us than merely reading aloud, that my software can do for me.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Adele Ward
I love Mary Oliver too. It's tricky converting poetry for ebooks because when lines roll over they don't indent, the first line indents and the second is left justified, so they look like a new paragraph of prose. With poetry the opposite needs to happen so that if a line is too long it rolls over slightly indented. This makes it tricky for poets self publishing. An easy explanation of how to solve this would be handy for a lot of people. I don't do conversions so I don't know.
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Precisely so.