Free & from the internet – this note describes a service motivated by the land grant’s mission. And, at its best, these institutions offer accessibility to current scholarship & practical delivery methods. Here it isn’t no-till methods but poetry.
American Life in Poetry is a free weekly column for newspapers and online publications featuring a poem by a contemporary American poet and a brief introduction to the poem by Ted Kooser. The sole mission of this project is to promote poetry, and we believe we can add value for newspaper and online readers by doing so.
This week’s column.
These can be delivered to be used by newspapers, but you can also sign up for the weekly column on your e-mail. (I know, I, too, already delete much that I might enjoy but won’t read – still this seems a worhwhile project.)
Sponsored by American Life in Poetry is funded and supported by The Poetry Foundation, the publisher of Poetry magazine. Administrative support has been provided by the English Department of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where the offices of the American Life in Poetry project are located.
I’ve been thinking about this in terms of our usual free market approach and I’m open to comments. It seems to me this is clearly accessible both as a blog and at no cost as a column. The choice of using the works or not is left up to us. Of course, the choices will be Kooser’s but so will the work–not unlike we other bloggers, who make our own choices, do our own work, and make accessible endless essays (some of which, of course, we support and some of which we argue against). I suspect in the future more and more academic and literary magazines will take this route; most of them are heavily subsidized already. Most of the editors would rather they made an impact (intellectually, literarily, politically – whatever the focus of the journal) than had more customers.
I keep saying this to my husband who edits just such a journal. His biggest headaches are with the printer, getting the journal addressed and out, and others spend much time updating subscriber lists. But the journal, which is pretty much academic/literary, will probably never support itself. His editing would never be easy since these essays require getting the diacritical marks right and dealing with submissions from a variety of countries with varying degrees of English proficiency. Still, the point is to reach people, to help form a community, to give expression to certain interests and increase scholarship about that community.