writing matters.

‎"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...

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 th...

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...

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...

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 the...

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 (...

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 i...