skin in the game

Poet, be thankful the typo you suffered was not a tattoo.

accidental editor

The publisher mangles a line, misses a word, or drops a whole passage—still, is it better or worse?—and somehow it comes out whole.

typos r us

I never criticize typos. Because I’ve never seen a typo any worse than the ones I’ve committed.

lightly read

It was the kind of publication that had no readers except for those contributors who bothered to read their own work upon publication, checking the piece for typos.

typo byproduct

If you haven’t suffered a bad typo, you’ve not published enough. To a publisher: If you haven't let slip an egregious typo, you're not publishing enough.

coins, stamps, poems

When a coin is misstruck or a postage stamp misprinted, it accrues more value. But a typo in a book of poems is always seen as a diminishment.

bhizzt phizzt

A typo is a language short circuit. It breaks and effectively ends the transmission as the reader’s mind struggles to create the proper connection.

resilient design

Even if in typesetting two or three lines got dropped the integrity of the poem would not be damaged.

parasite found

A poet is one who’d rather find a tick on his body than a typo in his published poem.

worse than being heckled

Oscar Wilde quipped that ‘a poet can survive anything but a misprint’. A corollary could be that a poetry reader can survive anything other than a noisy espresso machine.

sic n stet

Poetry is a copy-editor’s nightmare: One haunted by visions of ‘sic’ and ‘stet’.