JabberwockyNote: You can enjoy an MP3 of the essay below from Sadi Ranson-Polizzotti, TeleRead‘s e-book reviewer.

As a poet myself, it is only natural that I am often moved to read other poets–either for inspiration or for the sheer pleasure of simply reading without any work objective in mind. Until recently I had always taken my Tennyson and my Yeats off the top of my bookshelf, dusted off the thin, worn pages and carefully turned, reading each poem in turn. The same has been true of my Book of Nonsense with illustrations by Edward Lear and poems from diverse writers and anonymous poets and nonsense writers of all kind, including Lewis Carroll who included the poem Jabberwocky, my favorite and the first poem I ever memorized at age nine.

A Eureka moment about e-books and poetry

But the pages wear thin, the books begin to fall apart, and we wrap them in acetate and acid free paper; but it seems to make little difference now. The damage has been done. And so it was that the other night I had a Eureka moment. If I could read fiction and nonfiction on my borrowed Dell Axim, then why not download to Mobipocket reader on my Tungsten E? I had just bought a new memory chip, downloaded the right software and knew now how to download books from Blackmask–a surprisingly easy task (you simply take the cord of your palm device, hook it up to your computer and sync the computer with your desktop after the download is complete).

And so I did.

I admit, I was a bit wary of reading such ancient and true classics on a palm device. After all, something may get lost in translation so to speak. I had long believed that the dusty pages and the smell of the book were part of the deal. Would it be the same experience or worse or simply different?

A commitment to Jabberwocky

Well, too late because I had downloaded and thus made a commitment, however large or small, to at least trying to read Jabberwocky and select Tennyson and Yeats on my bright Tungsten E.

I have to say, despite any reservations I may have had, the experience has been nothing but positive and while I had or have no doubt that contemporary books would and have held up, it was the classics I was concerned about and yet… and yet… all I found was that I could take my poetry with me without fear of damaging the book further: that I could sit in my favorite café and read Tennyson with no fear of damage or page tear. Sure, I got a few looks from the curious, but none of them bad, just curious because not enough people seem to know that you can read whole books on palm devices–or if they do, they don’t seem to it in public and I don’t see many people doing it.

All I really want to say is that originally, I had gone online in search of some books for research material for a book I am writing– books by Kay Redfield Jamison and Elizabeth Wurtzel and was sadly unable to find them. it would have been great to take my research with me and in such a compact way and we can only hope that these books will soon be made available or if they are already, they will be free of charge someday like so may others at the regular venues like Blackmask and others.

Regardless, I may not have come away with my original intent, but I did come away with a new sense of how i could read Shakespeare, Tennyson, Yeats and even Virginia Woolf and despite my romantic notions, I found the work lost nothing through the wires.

The point then: don’t overlook the classics in favor of only new e-books. Re-discover those books that first moved you and take history in your back pocket.

Related: The Poet’s Voice Online, in the New York Times.

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Moderator’s note: Sadi Ranson-Polizzotti is a former publicity director and editor for David R. Godine, Publisher, and has worked at Conde Nast Publications, The Atlantic Monthly and others. She has been widely published and now writes regularly for several publications including the famous Cleveland Blogcritics, Geek2Geek, Boston Globe Arts Section, and she has also written for Publisher’s Weekly, Independent Publisher and others. Visit her Web site.

Enjoy Sadi’s podcasts regularly by pasting the TeleRead audio feed into your podware. And remember, she welcomes feedback.

2 COMMENTS

  1. One advantage that poetry has for ebooks is that the small size reduces the amount of scrolling/browsing you need to do. I find that reading prose on an axim is still somewhat painful, but I imagine not to be the case at all.

    I don’t read much poetry, but I find I like prefer eclectic anthologies by different poets rather than a series of poems by the same person. (I am reading this amazing anthology, Book of Luminous Things : An International Anthology of Poetry by Czeslaw Milosz).

    There’s a real need for editors/collectors to cull public domain poems from different sources and to package them more accessibly than the Blackmask editions. Maybe a site that feeds them one a day by RSS reader. I’ve used egress rss reader for Pocket PC, which isn’t bad, btw.

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