writing matters.

What is the purpose of writing published in small literary journals?

2011-05-28T18:55:00.000-07:00

This question returns to that posed by Teilo in one of his older posts. Off the top of my head, here are a few possible answers, which obviously overlap in places, followed by short meditations on each of them:

- Aesthetic enjoyment
- Narcissistic fulfillment
- Political/Cultural activism
- Community building/Networking

Aesthetic enjoyment:
Writing for the sake of writing. Producing combinations of words that are beautiful and then sharing those words with others in order to bask in this beauty together. This would include the intention of provoking thought, although perhaps these thoughts would be primarily of an abstract, aesthetic nature.

Narcissistic fulfillment
See Teilo's post from Oct.18th of last year (http://bit.ly/kzgnfq). He noticed that when people go to the website for The Oral Tradition they overwhelmingly spent their time on the submission guidelines page instead of checking out the past and current issues of the magazine. I've noticed this trend with The Writers Block as well. What's up with that? This trend would seem to indicate that most of us populating the online writing community are more concerned with getting ourselves published in as many places as possible than with actually reading other peoples' work. If this is the core reason for small (especially online) literary journals, perhaps that's why such venues often seem to struggle for aesthetic credibility in the arts community at large.

Political/Cultural activism
This is a tricky one, because as both a reader and an editor I usually detest work that has an obvious political message. But at the same time, politics and culture are inescapable and it seems naive to pretend otherwise, or to go about our writing with an attempted apolitical reserve. I can't help but agree with George Orwell when he asserts that "the opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude...It is simply a question of which side one takes and what approach one follows. And the more one is conscious of one's political bias, the more chance one has of acting politically without sacrificing one's aesthetic and intellectual integrity." So all writing is political (and cultural), but to what extent does this motivate or inform the content of and submissions to small literary magazines?

Community building/Networking
Perhaps we write to link up and share ideas with other writers. But if we're not reading anyone but ourselves (which I realize is not necessarily or completely the case), that throws some suspicion on this motive. And with the anonymity of online exchanges, does this really happen?

Manuscript Issue

2011-05-24T00:08:00.000-07:00

It's been awhile since my last post, but now that it's summer I've been reinvigorated to come back to the magazine and the blog. To shake the dust off, I want to give a brief glimpse into the direction The Writers Block is headed:

The next issue is going to be a tribute to and exploration of the relationship between handwriting and poetic composition. Until July 1st, the Block is accepting submissions for a poetry-only manuscript issue of handwritten and/or hand-illustrated poems in digitized, scanned, or photographed formats. I'm interested to see what sort of submissions will come in. I've tried to phrase the call specifically enough to communicate clearly what I'm looking for, while leaving it ambiguous enough to ensure a plurality of submissions.

The inspiration for the call came out of my research on e-books, and how emerging literary technologies are changing the way we read and experience older printed and hand-written texts. Both print and digitization flatten literary objects, largely catering to the idea that the "text" is a series of words in the order intended by their author. What this view neglects, however, are all the other aspects of texts: the spatial layout of the words on the page, the shape of the handcrafted letters, the extraneous marks, the scribbled illustrations, etc. More than anything, the translation of handwritten texts into print and digital formats erases all trace of the composition process: eraser marks, scratched out segments of text, re-arranged words and phrases. What I'm hoping is that this issue will foray into this older form of composition - a form that for most writers is still the initial mode of composition. Personally, I still scribble out poems and raps in notebooks and scrap paper before transcribing them onto the computer. There's something raw and personal about this original form, and hopefully this issue will preserve, display, and celebrate that.

Further inspiration comes by way of William Blake's famous illustrated poems (http://www.artscapes.ca/wp-content/uploads/2009/4/Tyger.jpg), Emily Dickinson's notoriously messy sonnets (http://shrvl.com/Gk176), and the striking images of T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" slashed and burned by the ruthless edits of Ezra Pound (http://people.virginia.edu/~sfr/enam312/tsewlms2.jpg).

Questions, comments, suggestions? Feel free to comment, visit the website at www.thewritersblockmagazine.ca or contact me at the.writers.block@hotmail.com.

Three Guidelines

2011-01-29T22:09:00.000-08:00

In an attempt to begin articulating what effective writing looks like at the present moment, Teilo and I have formulated three basic guidelines. They're meant to start a conversation more than anything, and are not meant to be overly prescriptive. However, we feel that following them as closely as possible will eliminate many of the weaknesses we have observed in the writing submitted to our respective literary magazines. In no particular order, they are:

- Subjectivity, as far as it illuminates common experience, can be more effective than objectivity.
- Intertextuality can be an addition, but never the crux.
- The form of a work of art should never become its content.

Please feel free to comment. Both affirmation and disagreement are necessary cogs in the engine of any progression.

Beyond Immediacy

2011-01-26T21:25:00.000-08:00

The closing sentence of your last post, Teilo, suggests that art doesn’t have to be as careful nowadays as it has been in times past. Is sloppy art the answer to sloppy communication? Is a plurality of art forms the answer to a plurality of communication modes? This type of art exists – in the form of fictional msn conversations, blog novels, etc. – and I think there is value to it, but I don’t understand why the thoughts of the modernists (or whoever) are “worse than meaningless.” I don’t think we’re really “reacting to” the modernists anymore either—although it’s impossible to quantify what “reacting to” even means—but we’re definitely influenced by them.

What I had in mind by pointing back to Imagism was to glean some of that movement’s aesthetic principles, in addition to adding principles of our own. In this way perhaps the strongest aspects of that movement can be adapted to fit our needs of expression in the 21^st Century. And the general thrust of my argument is not fixated on or restricted to works produced between 1890 and 1945, by any means. Imagism is just one example. The dictate to “make it new” is another, although I don’t think this lack of urgency that I perceive in today’s writing is a problem of newness, but rather of focus. Of course we shouldn’t expect our art to stay the same. It never does and never will. Even conscious imitation produces something different than the object it mimics.

So, diatribe or not, my basic question remains: what would a contemporary aesthetic philosophy look like that has more precision than simply gravitating towards works of immediacy?

Communication Breakdown?

2011-01-26T17:48:00.000-08:00

It's taken me awhile to find a response to Ben's last two posts. I can't help but hesitate to make sweeping condemnations of our own generation. It's so hard to see the whole picture from within that it's rarely worth trying to make judgements. On the other hand, a couple of thoughts have come to mind. The first is simply a question, why are we reacting to the modernists? Poetry is (besides visual art) the oldest form of Art. It's been around for thousands of years – from Gilgamesh right up to today. What's both fascinating, and scary is that in the past 100 years there has been more opportunity for formal innovation, and technological change than has ever happened in the history of the art. We can read what Eliot and Pound and Joyce and Woolf all have to say about writing, but it's really worse than meaningless.

This sounds dangerously like a diatribe against listening to / reading anything critical about a creative art. I hope it's not. I think this is actually a consequence of the Internet. The number of ways we can communicate with people instantaneously nowadays is astonishing if you compare it to even 25 years ago. The change from letters sent through the postal service to email made communication around the world much easier – and meant that a person's own community kept expanding, rather than staying more or less at one level. Facebook, Twitter, Skype, they're all part of the same phenomenon. We have more ways to communicate with an ever growing number of people, with far greater speed. This allows us (almost forces us) to place less importance upon the content and shape of our communication. Why spend a few days composing a letter to a friend when you know that you'll be talking to them at least a couple of times over those few days?

Of course the Arts are affected by these changes in technology. It's easy to see that there's more and more Art produced every year, and in more and more different and new mediums. I'm not sure that this is a problem. Nor do I think (as Ben does) that we have yet to find our “urgency,” and that as soon as we realize what truly matters to us, great Art will be produced. If the environmental situation doesn't count as urgent, I can't imagine what does (and there's a large enough movement behind it to produce an urgency for artists). No, I think what we're seeing now is a direct result of the overabundance of communication in our world. The whole point of Art is to communicate something with other people. To make a connection with them, and show them what you think is important. If we don't need to be as careful in our communication, then why should we expect our Art to stay the same?

Aesthetic Apathy

2011-01-08T20:40:00.000-08:00

I’d like to push this idea that today’s writing has no coherent aesthetic direction. Central to this lack is a complex net of social, political, and technological developments. For me, the “Facebook Generation” I referenced in the title of my last post already carries a note of exhaustion and cliché. What exactly does it mean to be living in such a generation? Beyond the useless moralistic debates that swirl around social networking sites, I prefer to analyze them as embodiments of social trends, and not as social trends in and of themselves. An integral aspect of the social realities advanced through the explosion of Web 2.0 onto the scene is that people have become more distanced from reality.

We North Americans live in fevered times, but in many ways these times always seem to happen elsewhere—on the internet, on our computer screens, across the ocean…wherever. War today is a foreign concept for the majority of North Americans under a certain age. We’ve heard stories of the World Wars, Vietnam, Korea, etc. and against the backdrop of these horrors, the ongoing wars in the Middle East just don’t carry the same “we-need-to-keep-our-lights-off-at-night-because-the-Germans-are-coming-to-bomb-us” kind of terror. So, we’ve got problems—massive environmental disasters, fuel and water shortages, economic recessions—but these problems are so abstract and complex that it’s difficult to know how and why doing art is a valuable and necessary activity anymore.

Political apathy is a major part of this aesthetic apathy. Writing is expression; it depicts, slants, and unveils reality from multiple perspectives. Yet instead of exploring and expressing the many issues the world is faced with, more and more of us choose to simply ignore these issues in favour of activities that give us easy and immediate gratification (like clubbing and video games). In order for writing to have a coherent aesthetic direction, it has to recognize and respond to the social, political, and technological realities of the present moment.

George Orwell begins Why I Write by stating, “As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me” (11). WWII lent Orwell’s writing a tone of pronounced urgency that resulted in classics like Animal Farm and 1984. The Facebook Generation has not yet realized the shape of its urgency, and thus it lacks aesthetic direction in both content and in form.

Writing for the Facebook Generation

2011-01-08T01:37:00.000-08:00

What has consistently bothered me about the founding tenet of The Writers Block—immediate impact above all else—is that it is a response (perhaps a concession) to an apathy, a lack of urgency in the public at large towards the literary arts. This consideration of one’s audience and social context is a precarious line to walk: on one side of the tightrope looms dumbed-down simplicity, and on the other lies complexity, intertextuality, and dismissal on the part of the average reader. This opposition, of course, is deliberately polarized, but it gets at the crux of the issue: at what point does good, innovative writing suffer under the restriction of having to make an immediate impact on an audience permeated by facebook, twitter, and smart phones?

Everyone will have their own answer to this question. Perhaps a more solvable and provocative question is this: how can writers nowadays create works that are new and unique, but also accessible? The writing I receive at The Writers Block—while often very compelling—seems lost. Aside from the inevitable narcissism and mimicry, the pieces of writing I subjectively deem “good” are quite disparate, both in content and in form. While this has been working just fine for the last three or so years, I can’t help but long for a more coherent aesthetic philosophy for the magazine than simply searching for work that produces an “immediate impact.”

Part of me is convinced I’m just naïve and ignorant to what is happening around me in the world of writing, that there are movements of writers and schools of thought, etc. that are pushing writing in this and that direction. Surely they exist. Yet, if I am unaware of such movements, I would guess that it is likely that many of the contributors to the Block and similar magazines are in the same boat, and that whatever these movements are doing, they're not having much of an impact on the average writer. What shape does writing need to take at this current historical moment to be socially and/or artistically effective?

For me, certain aspects of Imagism are attractive in this direction: sparse, well-crafted work that is built on pregnant images and uses less to convey more. As always, Ezra Pound's "In a Station of the Metro" is the ideal embodiment of these ideas (http://www.bartleby.com/104/106.html). I think it’s safe to say that at the present moment long-windedness has no place whatsoever. No one has the patience to read an issue of an online literary magazine composed primarily of four or five 6000 word “short” stories. Connected with the sparse beauty of Imagism, I would emphasize a continued focus on character development as well. If long-windedness has no place, neither does pure abstraction. When the succinctness of Imagism is grounded in the familiarity of human beings, the result is often an intriguing combination of complexity and immediacy. Ever since Issue 4 of the Block, which had as its theme, “People,” I have noticed myself gravitating more and more in my editorial decisions to work grounded in some way in the thorough exploration of the human psyche.

While these suggestions are not revolutionary, they begin to propose a direction for writing today that hopefully will become clearer and clearer as the apathy of the current generation continues to grow. These two trends cannot help but affect one another.

Canadian Performance Poetry Contest

2010-11-25T09:41:00.000-08:00

So Scott Griffin recently announced his sponsorship of a new poetry competition for high school students across Canada (read the G&M article on it here). Naturally enough, I'm in favour of it, particularly so because it emphasizes the performance of poetry and not simply the reading of it. When you are forced to think about how a poem (or any work of art) is communicating its meaning, you gain a better understanding of it (Ruth Padel's meditation on a Bruegel painting illustrates this point well). Beyond that, thinking about how to speak a poem (or any piece of literature) in such a way that you can actually keep an audience interested forces you to see the beauty of a poem, or its lack.

Despite what has been said in some critical/theoretical circles, there must be an inherent connection between beauty and art. Art cannot be anything (a mass-produced urinal comes to mind as a good example). The point of art is to force someone to reach out beyond themselves, so that they must grapple to return a little different from what they were before. Duchamps' "Fountain" does give a person an avenue to thinking about art/the world differently, but only if you're willing to make the first step towards that yourself. It doesn't grab you. Now, fair enough, shock and awe tactics can work much the same way as beauty for this. War art is particularly instructive for that (corpses mangled can be very effective to motivate change), but I think that the shock we receive from this sort of art depends upon our expectation and desire for beautiful art. When we find its lack, its exact opposite, presented in a forum for beauty, we become disgusted by the appraisal and attention given to such evil. because of this, shock and awe art only works when it is in the minority and presented against a backdrop of beautiful art.

Anyway, the point of this little digression is to go back to Mr. Griffin's initiative and say, "Thanks." I know my own only exposure to poetry in high school was a week-long look at Hallmark type poetry in a creative writing class, and when compared to the month we spent on how to write short stories, it becomes obvious how much poetry is avoided in the classroom. Even in my English Literature classes, it was avoided completely. Hopefully putting up some money for an intriguing contest can give kids a chance to experience oral poetry at its best and realize just how beautiful and fun it can be.

Return of the Litery Magazine

2010-11-10T07:42:00.000-08:00

I'd simply like to direct your attention to an excellent article in the Guardian.

Enjoy!

An 18th C. Style Plea For The Restoration Of The Art Of Listening

2010-11-01T01:57:00.000-07:00

A quick word of warning: this is a work of entertainment, filled with hyperbole, and is not intended to be taken in complete seriousness. With that in mind, enjoy!

Tempus tacendi, et tempus loquendi.

It has long been an Observation of mine that our World is little occupied with the Practice of Listening, and upon much Reflection, I have decided that there is a Moral Obligation for myself to expound on this most pressing Problem. In each Place, each Mode of Discourse, each Matter of Importance, I cannot help but be made aware of the Clamour created by a Miriad of Voices, each Shouting in a vain attempt to be heard above the Din of Others; not One realizing that their own Voice is simply Another Part of the Cacophony. Sirs, we seem to have lost the Art of Listening, and whereupon, our Manners and all things which proscribe to our very Humanity. As each Voice, each Opinion, each Insight piles ever higher upon the very Heap of Garbage that is swiftly accumulating within the Great Sphere of Literature, its Wretched Reak begins to overpower and obscure the Heart and Centre of this Great Tradition which has so unfortunately inspired the Multitude of Individual Response. With all my Heart, I urge and implore Each and Every One of Us to Refrain from all but the most Pure and Innocently Inspired Impulse to discover whether our own Humble Scribblings belong alongside those of our Betters. After all, it is only as a Society which can run as a well-oiled Machine, each Citizen accepting his Role and the Machine accepting each Citizen, that we can ever realize our Pretensions of being worthy of the Name: Human.

145 Years After Arnold

2010-10-28T18:40:00.000-07:00

‎"More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us. Without poetry, our science will appear incomplete; and most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry." - Matthew Arnold

Matthew Arnold published his essay "The Study of Poetry," back in 1865. It seems that 145 years later, some things have changed similarly to this prediction, while others remain the same. Physics in particular seems to have discovered an afinity with poetry that could only have been imagined by Arnold. Some of the brightest physicists in the world can only fall back upon metaphor and allegory to explain their findings and research. The idea that science must rely as much upon preception as anything else has started to remove some of its aloofness from the arts, although it is still slow going.

Poetry as an art may be fading into the background in society, but its methods of expressing thoughts and meaning continue to be important. This is especially true as we find ways to communicate in the digital age. Poetry is the art of communicating complex and beautiful ideas and feelings in a limited amount of space. Twitter may tend to dumb down some thoughts by limiting the amount of space used to express them, but that's where the challenge comes in! With so many people writing poetry (even if the reading of it doesn't get the same attention it used to), one can't help but imagine that will eventually carry over into our everyday lives with a little effort. Maybe with a little effort, we can make Matthew Arnold's vision come true.

A Look Backwards

2010-10-22T14:46:00.000-07:00

I've always felt that the best piece of advice that is always given to writers is to read as much as you possibly can, in as great a breadth as you possibly can. The more exposure you get to differing styles and voices, nevermind the appreciation and knowledge of history that comes with it, provides endless inspiration and direction for your own work. The modernists and post-modernists are innovative beyond belief. Read e.e. cummings and compare him to the poets who came before and afterwards. It's quite possible that he's been a more influential figure for poetry than Shakespeare. Before that, Byron and Tennyson show what can be accomplished through formal poetry, and if you're looking for satire, Swift is the master (and has been for centuries). And as much as cummings may have changed the poetic landscape entirely, it's impossible to overstate the impact the Renaissance had upon literature.

What fascinates me, as I look backwards for my own inspiration, is how the two most significant changes in literature (the Renaissance and modernism, in my opinion) came about from a rediscovery of the importance of the writing of earlier times. For the Renaissance, this meant rediscovering Plato and Aristotle, as well as Homer, Virgil, Ovid, etc. Suddenly the themes were no longer solely Christian; there were a multitude of sources upon which to draw for inspiration. Modernism also looked back to the Greeks and Romans, but through Ezra Pound in particular, medieval Chinese poetry and the French troubadours opened new avenues of expression (the medieval Chinese poetry helping to form his ideas around Imagism for example).

What else will come from the past to change literature today? Will the Americas' myths inform our writing more fully? With the explosion of fantasy, will medieval epics be rewritten in modern styles? What's next?

"Why Should We Write?"

2010-10-18T20:55:00.000-07:00

There's an interesting phenomenom I've noticed with the release of the first issue of The Oral Tradition: people go to the magazine's submission's page nearly as often as they look at the issue itself. This could mean any number of things, but I think it says something about writers nowadays. We seem to be more concerned with finding a place for our own voice to be heard than listening to other voices . . . and then we complain that no one is listening. This leads to the market being supersaturated, and brings me to a question I think will soon become essential to contemporary literature.

A certain question can come to define a certain age. Post-modernists asked "What should a poem be?" and modernists asked "Why should we continue to write the same way?" Before this, the typical question being answered in literature was "How should we live?" or "What is the good life?" I believe ours is "Why should we write?"

More people have more leisure time than ever before, and more people are trying their hand at writing (and succeeding for the most part). With all kinds of barriers having been broken by our predecessors, our choice of styles to express ourselves is nearly limitless. This means that we need, more than ever before, to have a deep understanding of our own goals and reasons for writing (if we're looking to be published, rather than writing for our own sake). This is an essential part of combining our impulse to write with the successful realization of our craft. When we understand why and how writing matters to us, our writing becomes far more impactful.

Maybe we all need to take a step back and really consider whether our work needs to be read by others.

How Do We Read Now?

2010-10-10T12:59:00.000-07:00

Why do the boundaries between poetry and other art forms matter?

I ask in order to follow up on your timely proposal to see what changes technology can bring to literary magazines like The Oral Tradition and The Writers Block. There are so many digital technologies available nowadays to writers that media players with voice recordings seem almost conservative by comparison. See Dakota by Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries or the Inanimate Alice series by Bradfield Productions, for example. Both of these examples seem innovative in a very literary fashion, even though they combine a variety of media. And I would argue that the questions about whether or not they qualify as poetry doesn't really matter to their value and force as an effective, verbal art form.

That's not at all to suggest, however, that sound recordings like those utilized by The Oral Tradition, Blackbird, and 2RiverView are archaic or not extremely effective. I think that being able to hear the voices of the men and women behind the words on the page adds a level of affect to the poetry that really makes it come alive. As the About page of TOT indicates, though, vocal recordings of poetry are more of a look backwards to poetry's roots in oral traditions (ballads, etc.) than a look forward.

To be a little provocative: how can we take full advantage of the tools at our disposal to find new and exciting ways to communicate our feelings if we're bound up with anxiety about whether or not we're producing "real" poetry?

Connected to all this, I would argue, is that formally experimental pieces of literary art mentioned above are beginning to change the way we read. Even though the computer screen is designed to mimic the printed page, the two mediums are fundamentally different. What innovative digital poetry is attempting to do is, like you say, actually capitalize on the media differences between the screen and the printed page. This involves the introduction of sound, Flash technology (moving text and colours, etc.), and even interactive elements that involve the reader to some degree, like a Choose Your Own Adventure novel (hypertexts). These formal experiments ask the reader of this new poetry (or whatever you want to call it) to read the screen as a screen as opposed to as a printed page. I'm not exactly clear on what the impact of this perceptual shift is or will be yet, but I think that is partly because the technology and experiments are still so new that its not yet clear in general. Its an interesting question to pay attention to though: With all the new technologies impacting online, digital writing, how do we read now?

Experimenting

2010-10-06T20:48:00.000-07:00

One of the things that annoys me most as a reader is when an author decides to get experimental. Now, don't get me wrong, finding new ways of writing and expressing yourself is a good thing. However, it's probably not the best idea to use symbols that vaguely resemble the letters you're trying to use to spell out words. Yes, it looks snazzy and very hip, but it distracts from what's really going on in the poem. A poem's form and its subject should compliment each other. It's rare that such extreme formal experimentation actually improves a poem's effect. I think that bill bisset is a great example of taking formal experimentation too far. Drawing cartoonish pictures, titling them, and calling them “visual poems” seems ridiculous. I just don't see how visual poetry becomes different from visual art. Poetry and art aren't simply categories that we fit things into. They're mediums that we use to express our thoughts and feelings. This means that they can (and should) change over time, but this change should never become the focus of the art. Courageously stretching the boundaries of what a poem can be just isn't a meaningful pursuit anymore. Between the modernists and the post-modernists, it's nearly impossible to think of a (meaningful) boundary in poetry that remains.

Instead, what I'd like to see being experimented with are the changes that technology can bring to the table. With my limited knowledge, that's what I've started to try doing with The Oral Tradition. Letting the author of a poem speak directly to the reader gives the poem a whole other dimension and allows the author even more power to communicate exactly what is intended. Instead of needing to be within hearing range of a person, the internet allows us to share these readings around the globe whenever a reader/listener wants. Other lit magazines are well ahead of me here too: Blackbird and 2RiverView come to mind as excellent examples. I think it's time that we started taking full advantage of the tools at our disposal and using them to find new, exciting ways to communicate our thoughts and feelings.

Writing About Writer's Block

2010-10-03T23:51:00.000-07:00

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")

Why Write?

2010-10-03T21:08:00.000-07:00

Most writers, when asked, will tell you that they write because they can't stop, can't help themselves. This is a great answer, except that they seem to have misunderstood what was being asked of them. The question isn't “Why do you write?” but rather, “Why should you write?” It's a very convenient, romantic notion of the suffering writer, who writes because he cannot stop, despite being ignored by all (I can't help but think of Dylan Thomas' “In My Craft or Sullen Art”). Unfortunately, this is useless, and largely untrue. No longer do writers have patrons, like Yeats, nor can any but the most successful make a living off their art (and do not choose their art over their worldly existence). Nearly every writer you read nowadays holds a job separate from their art, and although it may not sing to their souls in the same fashion, it is the lifeblood that shapes their experiences and, in turn, their art.

Yet again literature is struggling to reinvent itself. This is true in the publishing world, and in terms of the art itself. What does it mean to write in the digital age – and how should it be done? Both Ben Gehrels and myself are drawn to these questions, and through our projects, The Writers Block and The Oral Tradition, we are trying to find some answers to them. Literature is such a powerful medium that it will not 'die out' as some have predicted. The challenge before us is shaping its response to changes in technology and culture. This blog will provide insight into this challenge, and hopefully will instigate discussions and produce new ideas to lead us forward.