writing matters.

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 wi...

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 digitizati...

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.

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 o...

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 thi...

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 W...

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—whil...