A reprint of a February 2011 article by Daniel Nester and Steve Black, which ran on the now-defunct Bookslut website. — The literary magazine has long had a reputation for its fleeting existence — here today for issue 1, gone tomorrow by issue 3. But is that really true? And does the literary journal’s tiptoe along the precipice of failure differ from what other types of magazines face? The answer might…

I suspect I know what you’re thinking, dear readers. “Poetry and vinyl records?” you exclaim. “That’s a recipe for commercial disaster!” To this hypothetical remark I would point out that interest in vinyl records is the highest it’s been in decades. While streaming remains the dominant way we listen to…

What would it sound like if a book of poetry had its own musical score, like a film, written specifically to match the poems line for line and word for word? So begins the liner notes booklet that comes with poet and critic Ernest Hilbert’s LP, Elegies & Laments, which…

“You know what they say about actors performing poetry?” my old professor, Philip Levine, once asked our class. “They make bad poems sound good, they make good poems sound good, and they make great poems sound good.” I don’t think we necessarily need to unpack that quote, which I think…

Record-listening and writing go hand in hand for me. It’s the throughline of my life. Heaven, if it exists, will consist of a room with a stereo, where for eternity I will put favorite vinyl records on a turntable, sit back, and listen. …

Attention must be paid to style and formatting — Hi, my name is Daniel, and I edit online literary journals. I’ve edited literary journals on the web since the late 1990s. Journals and websites with stupid names like Ducky and Unpleasant Event Schedule and We Who Are About To Die. Along with the poetry slams, online lit journals saved…

An attempt at “converting” you into a devotee of a brilliant singer-songwriter — There are certain albums I pair exclusively with cassettes. Maybe I am thinking about this since we’re in the midst of a modest cassette tape revival. For cassette listeners of a certain age, myself included, we continue to dub copies and take out write-protect tabs in our dreams. My personal…

Queen’s mega-hit has been interpreted countless times. But who did it first? — Three years ago, we celebrated the 40th anniversary of the Queen classic “Bohemian Rhapsody,” complete with a reissue of the single’s original artwork for Record Store Day’s Black Friday and a Queen-endorsed brew, aptly named “Bohemian Lager,” made in — where else? — the Bohemia region of the Czech Republic. …

I have a rule that states that in rock music, there are Ethel Merman singers or Fozzie Bear singers. This rule applies only to singers with careers that begin after April 1970, the month the Beatles broke up. I call it The Ethel-or-Fozzie Rule. In this rule, I attempt to…