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Manuscript Issue

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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.

Comments

  1. AnonymousJune 16, 2011 at 8:37 AM

    i am very interested in this call for submissions -- i find it intriguing. will submit some work for sure. also blogged about this and the larger idea of the iterations of a MS/poem here: http://plumbblogdotnet.wordpress.com/2011/06/16/iterations/

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  2. UnknownJune 17, 2011 at 5:00 PM

    Thanks for the interest and the for the well-written meditation on the role of hand-writing in the composition process! "One Art" is one of my favourite (and admired) poems. Whereabouts did you find the draft with her scribbles on it? That poem in particular would be really neat to see in its original form, given Bishop's struggle to (write it!)

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  3. AnonymousJune 21, 2011 at 1:08 PM

    You are welcome! The early draft of Bishop's "One Art" can be found in Janet Burroway's text, Imaginative Writing: The Elements of Craft, Third Edition, pg 212.

    ReplyDelete
  4. AnonymousDecember 22, 2024 at 5:24 PM

    Thanks and I have a nifty proposal: What Does A Full House Renovation Cost cost to gut and renovate a house

    ReplyDelete

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