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A Look Backwards

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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?

Comments

  1. UnknownOctober 26, 2010 at 8:51 PM

    Connected to this is the problem of the new. As in, how do we are writers in 2010 produce something "new"? e.e.cummings is an interesting example, even just in terms of his formal move to lower-case expression. This has been copied endlessly, and often contributes nothing new or meaningful to the copyists' work; it just looks cool. In terms of what's next, I'm pretty sure no one's going to read that questions and say, "Hey! I know what's next! Its _______!" I think all we can do is ask questions like we have been on this blog that get at the impetus of writing. I think the question of what's next for us writing in the present moment ties in very closely with how literature and writing are being positioned/minimized/degraded/disseminated in the world's various cultures more generally. Because "artsy" writing seems so liminal in a lot of ways to the consciousness of everyday people, I think one solution is to do what The Writers Block and Oral Tradition strive for: to only publish writing that makes an impact on the reader, whatever this impact ends up looking like. For me, that's what's next. But I don't think this writing will end up unifying itself as neatly as writing in the Renaissance or Imagism, for example. I think its power lies in its diversity and ecclecticism.

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