A while back I put up a post about Jennifer Fortin (and friend’s) Leveler. It’s gone live, and it’s beautiful in all of its simple glory. The idea behind this online journal is transparency. The editors offer their thoughts on each poem that they publish (a new one every Sunday). (This site’s excellent layout gives you the choice to reveal or hide their words – the poem is always there.) And they invite readers to respond to the writers and the editors by posting the appropriate email addresses beside each poem. I’m interested to see how they reveal these conversations to the site’s readers if they’re conducted via email. Perhaps the solution would be to have an open conversation on a comments thread, and that they ask the writers that they publish to respond to all comments and questions about his or her poem for at least a week. Rob Schlegel’s poem “With Shut Eyes What My Mind Sees Does Not Belong To Me” is the first poem up.

Here’s the Leveler editors’ description of what they’re doing:

“To assure our readers we are being responsible editors and to increase the transparency of our editorial process as a whole, each poem published by LEVELER will be accompanied by a brief note on our selection entitled levelheaded. Here we will look at what a poem conveys and how. In no way do we claim levelheaded is a final, authoritative take on any corresponding poem. Instead, we hope to provide readers with another way into the poem, thereby encouraging closer readings, and ultimately, challenges to our findings.”