Poetry proves to be tough fit in e-form

NEW YORK - Billy Collins, one of the country's most popular poets, had never seen his work in e-book form until he recently downloaded his latest collection on his Kindle.

He was unpleasantly surprised.

"I found that even in a very small font that if the original line is beyond a certain length, they will take the extra word and have it flush left on the screen, so that instead of a three-line stanza you actually have a four-line stanza. And that screws everything up," says Collins, a former U.S. poet laureate whose "Ballistics" came out in February.

When he adjusted the size to large print, his work was changed beyond recognition, a single line turning into three, "which is quite distressing," he adds.

► View a special online interactive that shows how a Kindle transforms the formatting of a poem, including audio interpretation.

Poetry, the most precise and precious of literary forms, also is so far the least adaptable to the growing e-book market.

A three-line stanza might be expanded to four if a line is too long or a four-line stanza compressed into three if the second and fourth lines have sharp indentations, as with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "Hymn to the Night."

Royalty disputes, philosophical objections and suspicions of technology are keeping countless books from appearing in electronic form, from "The Catcher in the Rye" to "Gravity's Rainbow."

But for poetry, the gap is especially large because publishers and e-book makers have not figured out how the integrity of a poem can be guaranteed. And a displaced word, even a comma, can alter a poem's meaning as surely as skipping a note changes a song.

"The critical difference between prose and poetry is that prose is kind of like water and will become the shape of any vessel you pour it into to. Poetry is like a piece of sculpture and can easily break," Collins says.

Major poets not yet in e-form include Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Sylvia Plath, W.H. Auden and Robert Lowell, Langston Hughes and C.K. Williams. No e-editions of poetry are available from this year's Pulitzer Prize winner, Rae Armantrout; from Pulitzer winner and incoming U.S. poet laureate W.S. Merwin; or from such recent laureates as Charles Simic, Robert Pinsky and Louise Glueck.

"I have mixed feelings about poetry and e-books," says awa

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