Earlier today, the second update at Linebreak went live with a new poem from Bruce Bond. The update also brought two new design elements for each poem — audio and an author bio. I kept the new elements unobtrusive by hiding them behind a slider from the incredible mootools library. My goal in the overall design was to preserve the primacy of the individual poem, and I think the slide effect makes the new elements available while maintaining that.
One thing that creating Linebreak has emphasized is how difficult it is to escape the vocabulary and conventions of print journals. How, for instance, should we describe the site? Our first instinct was to call it “an online journal of original poetry.” But it isn’t a journal — it’s a web site that publishes one original poem each week. And what do we call each weekly update? My first impulse was to say the second edition went live today, but editions have no place online — they’re tied to the scarcity and cost of paper. Part of the cost of creating new things is finding new words to describe them, because words color conception.