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Lena Dunham
(Editor, Dead Horse Review)
Lena Dunham was born in New York city in 1986. She is now a
student at Oberlin College, where she majors in creative writing and minors in
anxiety. She has held various jobs, such as dog groomer (although she never had
any client twice) and contributing editor at Teen Vogue magazine. Her
poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in The Saint Ann’s Review, Deep
Cleveland and Melancholia’s Tremulous Dreadlocks. Besides poetry,
she also enjoys making plays and movies.
Q:
How has publishing changed with the advent of short-run printing and
print-on-demand possibilities? Does this negate any need to sell a specific
number of a title? Is this a
freedom from traditional print expectations/values? A:
My only experience as a publisher is online and not-for-profit, so these issues
have never really affected me. I can tell you this: last summer I was an intern
at Soft Skull Press and the amount of Q:
Why does poetry continue to create schools and movements who feud? A:
As with all art forms, people have different ideas about what constitutes
poetry. There's also the basic human desire to belong to a club, I think, and
artists with similar habits can stick together for Q:
With POD possibilities, including various organisations that will take on
anything without a set-up fee and simply send royalties to the author, do poetry
publishers need arts council subsidies any more? A:
The fact is, my knowledge of what it takes to run a real-world poetry press is
way lacking. I do know that it's not a lucrative business and making it work is
near-impossible. Small presses have to Q:
If poetry presses are concerned with cultivating a wider readership, could this
not be done more effectively via the Internet (where there are thousands of
potential readers) rather than worrying A:
I can only speak to my own experience, but I think my Internet habits are pretty
typical for a college gal such as myself. I web-surf the way I used to channel
surf as a little kid. I find completely insane websites all the time and often
have no idea what Google-chain got me there. I share this to illustrate the
point that the Internet leads people who don't consider themselves "poetry
people" to poetry sites. To me that's the main attraction of publishing in
that medium. There are, of course, a million more benefits to publishing online.
There’s the double-delight of minimal overhead and maximal availability. The
web is the way to reach the masses no matter what artistic medium you're working
in, although there's always something to be said for a live music performance, a
trip to the movie theatre or a poetry chapbook that you can hold in your hands.
copyright © Lena Dunham |