The digital social network revolution was supposed to be an era where everyone is humilated together.

So, it came as quite a surprise to me that I was approached by a poet whose poems were in early issues of Napalm Health Spa. The poet needed distance from the poems in order to get a job.

In the era of book printing, any request to change a text was impossible post-publication. The digital page changed that.

I don’t know how this is managed by other online publications, but the requests came to me regarding poems in issues over a decade in the archives.

I needed to let anyone interested know that this change was made under threat of legal action by the poet.

I can appreciate the need for expediency by this person. Surely, it’s a tough job market out there.

Are online publishers obligated to comply with such requests? It seems as though any poet could request that revisions be made to work in any issue at any time. What does that make of the historical record?

I work with authors to make all kinds of changes around the time a new issue comes out, but once something is archived, isn’t it somewhat still “done” like a book-object and subject to being as it is?

I think this was a very unique situation, but it has raised interesting questions that I don’t have the answers to.