Magazine Unbound

That Kathleen Bolick '95 can write HTML is helpful. That she reads and appreciates contemporary poetry is essential. That nothing Bolick writes or edits at The Atlantic Monthly is printed on paper is a sign of our changing times.

Bolick is one of four editors of The Atlantic Unbound, the on-line version of The Atlantic Monthly. Her specialty is poetry. "Just the fact that I had these literary and poetic interests meant I could kind of craft a position that I wanted," Bolick said. "The reading that made me familiar with the contemporary literary landscape, that really was useful. And nobody else was interested in working with the poets, especially."

Not that they aren't interesting. Bolick has interviewed renowned writers–Edna O'Brien, Nadine Gordimer, Mary Gordon and Annie Proulx '57, to name just a few. She went to poet Donald Hall's home and taped him reading his work. The day we spoke she was about to interview poet Philip Levine and had recently spoken at length with Joseph Epstein. "He was great," she said. "A lot of fun. The funny thing about these interviews is [that] the more famous a person is, the less interesting they can tend to be because they've got kind of a schtick going on. When you have these mid-famous people, they tend to be more interested in the publicity I guess."

And the on-line Atlantic does put poets in the public eye. The Atlantic Unbound gets 1.8 million page views per month, and that number is rising steadily, Bolick says. The intent is to provide different content from the print version of the magazine–different columns, stories about digital culture. "We're trying to appeal to a younger audience, or a more tech-savvy audience," Bolick said.

Readers/listeners of Atlantic Unbound can, via audio links, hear poets read their works published in the print magazine (Peter Harris, poet and professor of English at Colby, is now on the site). An offering called "Soundings" has an essay about a poem, and then four poets read the work. Last month Lloyd Schwartz wrote an essay about a poem by Elizabeth Bishop. Schwartz, U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky, Gail Mazur and Mark Strand read the poem aloud.

With previous experience limited to an internship at a book review journal and waiting tables, Bolick broke into magazines as assistant to an Atlantic vice president and learned on the job; soon she was "putting out the content." Every six weeks or so she would take a two- or three-week break from the Web pages to bone up on a poet or novelist to prepare for an interview.

Last summer, Bolick opted for a bigger break. She left her full-time job at The Atlantic to enter the cultural reporting and criticism program at New York University. She planned to continue at The Atlantic as a contributing writer and editor for Atlantic Unbound, which for Bolick can hardly be called work. Asked what she does for fun on her own time, she said, "I read a lot."

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