I feel full; I'm so much more alive at that moment.
- Jennifer Ley
If I had to describe the character of publishing on the Net, I would say that it is like a friend who changes her hair color on a regular basis. Each week as I sleuth around for new links for this topic, I find sites so unique and daring that I am sure they are part of history in the making. Poetry, for instance, lends itself readily to online publishing and experimentation, because it is broken into lines and usually spans less than a page. Images can, with a bit of coding, be coupled with verse to create a completely new treatment for the written word.
One person who uses both poetry and images in compelling fashion is Jennifer Ley, editor of Perihelion. Last week's column dealt with the joint effort of Perihelion and Conspire to showcase the subject of women's writing. As I explored these zines, I became more curious about Ms. Ley. She had accepted several of my poems for publication and sent an e-mail that resulted in my learning how to do something new.
She wanted the writers for this issue, if we could, to produce a sound file. She provided how-tos, but never having done this before, I was a little anxious. After a fiasco involving a microphone that turned out to be incompatible with my system, and realizing that it would take several tapings before a good one occurred (no dog barking, no children screaming, no bird squawking when the cat walked by), I finally got the thing done.
During our correspondence, Ley mentioned that she had been outdoors all day "shooting." Now what, I wondered, would this talented woman be shooting, exactly? I asked her what she does when she's not editing or writing. "I work as a script supervisor on television commercials," she answered. "There's the perspective I was talking about -everything from that little Taco doggie to Cindy Crawford and Brad Pitt." The "perspective" mentioned applies to questioning Ms. Ley about her work. She replied, "Answering questions about one's work always gives a bit of perspective, and I think I needed it."
The reason for that need relates to Ms. Ley's diversity. She is a fine poet, but she is also a fine, and self-declared, "imagist." "Metaphor, verbal or visual, is what really motivates me," she explains. "My formal education was in the visual arts; the art I made, and still make, always relies on building layers of meaning, whether those layers use visual images or words, or - as in my hypertext suites of poems - combinations of the two."
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