As the Editor of a literary magazine called The Writers Block, I guess I shouldn't be surprised at the amount of submissions I receive about the phenomenon of writer's block. But I am. With one or two exceptions, these pieces (usually poems) go like this: 1) The writer is confronted with a blank page, 2) This terrifies and frustrates them, 3) They lament and grapple with words, struggling through the darkness until, lo and behold, 4) The blank page is no longer blank and they've produced a poem after all. Up until this point I am 100% supportive of such processes. All writers go through this on a regular basis, and the best way to get through it is to just write, no matter what you write about. Usually when you're stuck you end up writing about how you're stuck. I get it.
What I'm not supportive of is 5) Gushing with relief at their new-found liberation, the writer slaps a writer's block-related title on their new poem and sends it to a literary magazine ("Hey, what about The Writers Block?") to get published. When I receive poems about how difficult it is being a writer, I can't help but remember a line from this one Immortal Technique song: "You coffee-shop revolutionary son of a bitch." That's a little extreme, of course, but what I mean by that is that being a writer is a privilege. There are all kinds of writers and ways of writing in North America alone, but I think its safe to assume that the vast majority of those of us who submit and subscribe to literary magazines are likely typing on laptops, maybe sipping mochachinos, attending or teaching classes at some sort of post-secondary education. This is a generalization, but, I would argue, a valuable one. What I want to get across on my first entry in this blog is that those of us who fall under one or more of these generalizations need to take a step back every now and then and put things in perspective: if you're submitting to a literary magazine, you're probably in pretty good shape. Therefore offering up a poem for others to read about how hard it is to be a writer probably isn't all that important.
For me at least those sorts of poems are not only boring, but narcissistic as well. When we submit a poem somewhere for publication, we are implying that the words we speak in it are important and should be heard by other people. What both The Writers Block and The Oral Tradition attempt to promote is writing that above all else leaves an immediate impact on the reader. Writing about how hard it is to write rarely (if ever) needs to be heard by other people. Especially when such writing is distracting people's attention away from narratives like Richard Stevenson's "Rock, Scissors, Paper" in the newest issue of TOT, which at one point takes the perspective of a child rapist/murderer in order to show how depraved our society and media are in terms of what we want to see on TV. Now THAT is writing that matters.
(For the record, TWB has only ever published one poem about writer's block. It's the last poem in the fourth issue, by Peycho Kanev and I stand by its publication to this day. This is it: "The tongue of my soul / is hanging out")
What I'm not supportive of is 5) Gushing with relief at their new-found liberation, the writer slaps a writer's block-related title on their new poem and sends it to a literary magazine ("Hey, what about The Writers Block?") to get published. When I receive poems about how difficult it is being a writer, I can't help but remember a line from this one Immortal Technique song: "You coffee-shop revolutionary son of a bitch." That's a little extreme, of course, but what I mean by that is that being a writer is a privilege. There are all kinds of writers and ways of writing in North America alone, but I think its safe to assume that the vast majority of those of us who submit and subscribe to literary magazines are likely typing on laptops, maybe sipping mochachinos, attending or teaching classes at some sort of post-secondary education. This is a generalization, but, I would argue, a valuable one. What I want to get across on my first entry in this blog is that those of us who fall under one or more of these generalizations need to take a step back every now and then and put things in perspective: if you're submitting to a literary magazine, you're probably in pretty good shape. Therefore offering up a poem for others to read about how hard it is to be a writer probably isn't all that important.
For me at least those sorts of poems are not only boring, but narcissistic as well. When we submit a poem somewhere for publication, we are implying that the words we speak in it are important and should be heard by other people. What both The Writers Block and The Oral Tradition attempt to promote is writing that above all else leaves an immediate impact on the reader. Writing about how hard it is to write rarely (if ever) needs to be heard by other people. Especially when such writing is distracting people's attention away from narratives like Richard Stevenson's "Rock, Scissors, Paper" in the newest issue of TOT, which at one point takes the perspective of a child rapist/murderer in order to show how depraved our society and media are in terms of what we want to see on TV. Now THAT is writing that matters.
(For the record, TWB has only ever published one poem about writer's block. It's the last poem in the fourth issue, by Peycho Kanev and I stand by its publication to this day. This is it: "The tongue of my soul / is hanging out")
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