Time Flies When You're Publishing Poetry

The editors at Linebreak magazine are putting together an e-book anthology organized by time-constraint. Two Weeks will be, you guessed it, compiled in only a fortnight:

For years, ebooks have been ignored by most poetry publishers. Today, the few poetry ebooks available are little more than cut-and-paste versions of their print counterparts. And many fail to preserve line breaks and other basic formatting.

We're certain we can do better. That's why we're creating an all-new, ebook-only anthology of contemporary poetry. Beginning on Tuesday, January 11, we'll start accepting public submissions. We'll compile and design a cutting-edge, multi-format ebook. We'll publish it.

And we'll do it all in exactly two weeks.

We like this idea, especially the part about formatting poetry for e-books. But it’s interesting to note that the very accessibility of digital publication (and print on demand technology) leads to an implicit assumption that the urgency of poetic writing (and other kinds of writing) can be captured in the instantaneous-ness of its publication. There might be some truth to this, but it’s also worth questioning. Does a poem speak to its moment more truly if published in that moment? We'll find out in two weeks!