“I’ve always felt that poetry is not an art object to be idly studied,” writes artist Jon Cotner. “Rather, it’s a way of life, a mode of knowing—a call to become more attentive and active.”

Acting on this sentiment, Cotner created a “Poem Forest,” a living example of poetry, in the New York Botanical Garden, this past fall.

Cotner’s installation takes classic lines from poetry and imposes them on a 20 minute walk through the park. He explains his intent on the BMW Guggenheim blog: “Poetry can wake us, and in the process we create a shared world or ‘the commons.’ But what characterizes this common world? How can we describe it? With such questions in mind, I shapedPoem Forest. A typical literary event wouldn’t work; it’s too easy to drift while others read their own prewritten material. Poem Forest needed to be more engaging. Otherwise it wouldn’t be poetic.”

EBooks and poetry do not go hand in hand. With the ability to zoom in, change fonts and change text size on eBooks, you run the risk of losing meaning. Imagine changing the spacing of an Ezra Pound poem, whose visual presentation is part of the work.

Craig Morgan Teicher at Publisher’s Weekly blogged recently about his dismay when trying to read an eBook version of Allen Ginsberg’s Collected Poems and found the liniation was all messed up. (See the above photo).

From Publisher’s Weekly: “Ginsberg broke his poem into what he called “strophes,” those long lines that hark back to Whitman.  The indentations you see above are meant to indicate that the line keeps going beyond the end of the page, until the next left-justified line.  Ginsberg was careful in his liniation, and part of the poem’s impact is in seeing that “who” sticking out again and again on the left side of the page.  The digital version pays no mind to this whatsoever.  What we get is not the poem itself, but a kind of poor transcription of it.”

How do you think that poetry can be saved?