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Authors: Jane Yolen

Among Angels

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Among Angels

Poems

Nancy Willard and Jane Yolen

For Frederick and Claske Franck
—
N. W.

To David Stemple, Angel of Archives
—
J
.
Y
.

For Michael
—
S
.
S
.
G
.

Contents

Publisher's Note

Prayer
N
.
W
.

Pistis Sophia: A Dispatch
J
.
Y
.

Angel among the Herbs
N
.
W
.

An Angel Considers the Naming of Meat
N
.
W
.

Every Visible Thing
J
.
Y
.

Angels in Winter
N
.
W
.

Angel in Summer: West Virginia
J
.
Y
.

The Mission of the Puffball
N
.
W
.

Names
J
.
Y
.

A Carol for the Shepherds
N
.
W
.

An Angel Tells the Birds to Gather for the Great Supper of God
N
.
W
.

Dancing with Angels
J
.
Y
.

Aunt Fanny
J
.
Y
.

Harpo and the Angel
N
.
W
.

An Inconvenience of Wings
N
.
W
.

Angels Fly
J
.
Y
.

The Winged Ones
N
.
W
.

Metamorph
J
.
Y
.

Angel Feather
J
.
Y
.

Angel in a Window
N
.
W
.

Lucifer
J
.
Y
.

Easter Sermon
J
.
Y
.

Harahel Writes on the Head of a Pin
J
.
Y
.

Gabriel Returns from the Annunciation
N
.
W
.

Angelic Script
J
.
Y
.

The Founding of Saint Andrews
J
.
Y
.

The Lesson on Guardian Angels at Star of the Sea Elementary
N
.
W
.

The Twenty-eight Angels Ruling in the Twenty-eight Mansions of the Moon
J
.
Y
.

Angels among the Servants
N
.
W
.

Photographing Angels
N
.
W
.

Jacob Boehme and the Angel I
N
.
W
.

Visitation in a Pewter Dish II
N
.
W
.

Jacob and the Angel
J
.
Y
.

Rabbi Loew and the Angel of Death
J
.
Y
.

Tobias and the Fish
N
.
W
.

The Archangel Michael Delivers a Sermon to the Stars
J
.
Y
.

About the Authors

Publisher's Note

Long before they were ever written down, poems were organized in lines. Since the invention of the printing press, readers have become increasingly conscious of looking at poems, rather than hearing them, but the function of the poetic line remains primarily sonic. Whether a poem is written in meter or in free verse, the lines introduce some kind of pattern into the ongoing syntax of the poem's sentences; the lines make us experience those sentences differently. Reading a prose poem, we feel the strategic absence of line.

But precisely because we've become so used to looking at poems, the function of line can be hard to describe. As James Longenbach writes in
The Art of the Poetic Line
, “Line has no identity except in relation to other elements in the poem, especially the syntax of the poem's sentences. It is not an abstract concept, and its qualities cannot be described generally or schematically. It cannot be associated reliably with the way we speak or breathe. Nor can its function be understood merely from its visual appearance on the page.” Printed books altered our relationship to poetry by allowing us to see the lines more readily. What new challenges do electronic reading devices pose?

In a printed book, the width of the page and the size of the type are fixed. Usually, because the page is wide enough and the type small enough, a line of poetry fits comfortably on the page: What you see is what you're supposed to hear as a unit of sound. Sometimes, however, a long line may exceed the width of the page; the line continues, indented just below the beginning of the line. Readers of printed books have become accustomed to this convention, even if it may on some occasions seem ambiguous—particularly when some of the lines of a poem are already indented from the left-hand margin of the page.

But unlike a printed book, which is stable, an ebook is a shape-shifter. Electronic type may be reflowed across a galaxy of applications and interfaces, across a variety of screens, from phone to tablet to computer. And because the reader of an ebook is empowered to change the size of the type, a poem's original lineation may seem to be altered in many different ways. As the size of the type increases, the likelihood of any given line running over increases.

Our typesetting standard for poetry is designed to register that when a line of poetry exceeds the width of the screen, the resulting run-over line should be indented, as it might be in a printed book. Take a look at John Ashbery's “Disclaimer” as it appears in two different type sizes.

Each of these versions of the poem has the same number of lines: the number that Ashbery intended. But if you look at the second, third, and fifth lines of the second stanza in the right-hand version of “Disclaimer,” you'll see the automatic indent; in the fifth line, for instance, the word
ahead
drops down and is indented. The automatic indent not only makes poems easier to read electronically; it also helps to retain the rhythmic shape of the line—the unit of sound—as the poet intended it. And to preserve the integrity of the line, words are never broken or hyphenated when the line must run over. Reading “Disclaimer” on the screen, you can be sure that the phrase “you pause before the little bridge, sigh, and turn ahead” is a complete line, while the phrase “you pause before the little bridge, sigh, and turn” is not.

Open Road has adopted an electronic typesetting standard for poetry that ensures the clearest possible marking of both line breaks and stanza breaks, while at the same time handling the built-in function for resizing and reflowing text that all ereading devices possess. The first step is the appropriate semantic markup of the text, in which the formal elements distinguishing a poem, including lines, stanzas, and degrees of indentation, are tagged. Next, a style sheet that reads these tags must be designed, so that the formal elements of the poems are always displayed consistently. For instance, the style sheet reads the tags marking lines that the author himself has indented; should that indented line exceed the character capacity of a screen, the run-over part of the line will be indented further, and all such runovers will look the same. This combination of appropriate coding choices and style sheets makes it easy to display poems with complex indentations, no matter if the lines are metered or free, end-stopped or enjambed.

Ultimately, there may be no way to account for every single variation in the way in which the lines of a poem are disposed visually on an electronic reading device, just as rare variations may challenge the conventions of the printed page, but with rigorous quality assessment and scrupulous proofreading, nearly every poem can be set electronically in accordance with its author's intention. And in some regards, electronic typesetting increases our capacity to transcribe a poem accurately: In a printed book, there may be no way to distinguish a stanza break from a page break, but with an ereader, one has only to resize the text in question to discover if a break at the bottom of a page is intentional or accidental.

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