{"id":33,"date":"2016-09-09T12:30:33","date_gmt":"2016-09-09T12:30:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gojonstonego.com\/blog\/2016\/09\/09\/asterism-book-and-event\/"},"modified":"2016-09-09T12:30:33","modified_gmt":"2016-09-09T12:30:33","slug":"asterism-book-and-event","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gojonstonego.com\/blog\/2016\/09\/09\/asterism-book-and-event\/","title":{"rendered":"*** Asterism *** Book and Event"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/figure>\n

This is Asterism<\/a><\/i>, edited by Tiffany Anne Tondut, who has modestly left her name off the cover. It\u2019s \u2018an anthology of poems inspired by punctuation\u2019, and guess what? I made the team! (\u201dI made the team\u201d immediately in the running to be 2016\u2032s most irritating euphemism for \u201cLook, I got published again\u201d). The poem of mine included is called\u00a0\u2018\u2013\u2019 and it\u2019s about the dash. Not the hyphen (-), and not the em-dash (\u2014), which I never use and which can, frankly, get fucked, but the good old en-dash dash,the single most useful tool in the transcript editor\u2019s punctuation kit. When people write, they tend to write in grammatically sound sentences. When they speak, they speak in chopped up fragments of sentences. When you write down what people speak, you need your pal, the dash, to sew those fragments together.<\/p>\n

(The dash is also a cause of some frustration to me as a web designer and occasional blogger <\/p>\n

\u2013<\/p>\n

\u00a0there\u2019s no key for it on the keyboard, so you have a choice of either lazily employing the hyphen in its place or remembering to use special characters as you\u2019re typing).<\/p>\n

This is one of two posts I\u2019m putting up today concerning relatively new small presses putting out anthologies. Laudanum, publishers of Asterism<\/i>, are brand new. This is their first book. When Kirsty and I started Sidekick in 2009, the poetry small press scene (as we knew it) was all about single-author collections, and we felt we were making a kind of foolish, gung-ho stand in concentrating on collaborative works. Now you have the likes of the Emma Press, Live Canon and Laudanum on the scene, it\u2019s like reinforcements have arrived. The thing about anthologies is that the small indie publisher loses two of its most important demographic pie-slices \u2013 the ecstatically proud friends and family of the author, and those who queue to buy the author\u2019s book after a barnstorming live performance. An editor who produces a book simply does not have the same cache with his or her non-writerly acquaintances \u2013 it\u2019s not\u00a0\u2018your\u2019 book \u2013 and nobody does a gig in order to sell copies of the anthology they appear in.<\/p>\n

All of which (segue incoming!) makes the launch event very important, so if you\u2019re free tonight, Laudanum are launching Asterism<\/i>, amid a flurry of readings and intoxication, at the Betsey Trotwood in Farringdon, London, from 7.30. You can hear my dash poem out loud and try to guess where the dashes are in it (hint: there are only two).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is Asterism, edited by Tiffany Anne Tondut, who has modestly left her name off the cover. It\u2019s \u2018an anthology of poems inspired by punctuation\u2019, and guess what? I made the team! (\u201dI made the team\u201d immediately in the running to be 2016\u2032s most irritating euphemism for \u201cLook, I got published again\u201d). The poem of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0},"categories":[1],"tags":[166,191,46,4,190],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gojonstonego.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gojonstonego.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gojonstonego.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gojonstonego.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gojonstonego.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/gojonstonego.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gojonstonego.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gojonstonego.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gojonstonego.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}