Forum / The world is no longer everything we thought was the case, and the writing needs to embody this

Andrew Stancek
Sep 16, 06:25pm

A challenging article about what and how we write, and the world around us, by AGNI editor Sven Birkerts.

Merits thought and discussion.

http://www.bu.edu/agni/essays/print/2006/63-birkerts.html

Susan Tepper
Sep 16, 08:57pm

History tells of "a world" has been an endless series of wars, famines, unemployment, devalued currencies, ethnic cleansings, child abuse, mutilations......
Let's just write what springs forth from our unconscious and leave it at that. This article is a little precious for my (not yet spilled) blood.

Susan Tepper
Sep 16, 09:01pm

Andrew, my diatribe was not directed at you but at these tiresome articles that spring up from time to time. I don't believe PC is the place writers should come from when working their craft. No artist should be restricted by Politically Correct ideals, motives, good deeds, niceities... Just write what you damned well want to and have the courage to stand behind what you write.

Carol Reid
Sep 16, 09:21pm

I like this-

"This writing must, in effect, create its own world and terms from the threshold, coming at us from a full creative effort of imagination and not by using the old world as a prop."

I'm finding this article a useful reference point for examining my own work, especially work that has been rejected many times despite my pride and joy in the piece!

Susan Tepper
Sep 16, 09:33pm

Carol, with all due respect (to you):
"All writing must create its own world and terms from a full creative effort" (well what is NEW about that?)
As far as using "the old world as a prop"-- what does that even mean???
What is the "old world"? Yesterday? A moment earlier?

David Ackley
Sep 16, 11:53pm

The idea that there must be new forms to suit a new time must have been around ever since there was writing, if not time. One can sympathize with an editor like Birkerts who's no doubt seen everything if not dozens of times but one ought not confuse being jaded with the discovery of some nifty new aesthetic. It's also weak to use it as an excuse to discard stories on the strength of a first line that isn't all roman candle. First lines or even first paragraphs don't metonymically stand for stories, they are a part of them, no more or less important than the middle or the end. Editors who ignore this fact risk publishing stories--and some do--that are lopsided and weakly developed, fizzing out after the first paragraph has come and gone.

Andrew Stancek
Sep 17, 12:54am

I have been pondering the ideas in the article for a while. I do find them troubling. A part of me wonders whether it is just a variation on a popular fiction versus high-brow lit discussion.

Someone very dear to me is currently totally swept up in academia and is studying and writing "language poetry." I do not understand it, do not enjoy it, perhaps even do not buy it. I read and enjoy traditional poetry.

Is Birkerts' argument akin to the thinking behind language poetry? Perhaps.

For me a troubling, challenging discussion. But in the end I think I will remain a traditionalist, with no desire to be published by Agni.

Jane Hammons
Sep 17, 12:57am

I can't even really read this piece. It seems almost intentionally confusing (bloated?)--perhaps as a way of seeming to say something new? I've never been much of a Birkerts fan (of his writing; I didn't know he was the editor at Agni), so I'm not reading objectively. I've seen this article referenced everywhere today (which suggests its value to many), and felt compelled to throw my two cents at it!

Ann Bogle
Sep 17, 01:56am

I wrote a blog post about a different article by Birkerts four years ago. You can read it here:

http://annbogle.blogspot.com/2007/08/criticism-at-weblogs.html

James Lloyd Davis
Sep 17, 03:25am

Like Jane, I found myself turned off by the article.

Art is not science. It is not reasoned, I believe, but intuitive ... and I doubt that writing is something that can be taught as a craft like, say, diagnostic auto mechanics, which is a reasoned, logical process. That's not to say that an auto mechanic cannot be intuitive or artistic, but that's another story.

New technology and science stands on the shoulders of older accepted theories like a Jacob's ladder of progressive human effort, rising ever higher toward ... if not truth ... at least toward a more accurate understanding of what might be true.

This is the academic standard and it works quite well in science when it escapes the killing gravity of academic politics.

In art, theory and form are mere tools and not the goal of the writer's discipline. Fiction is not truth or science, but art. It is employed for many reasons with infinite possibility for outcome. I'm not certain that we should worry too much about the academic disciplines that have been applied and continue to be applied to what we call 'literature' so much as the humanity and the emotion, the passion of imagination involved in creativity.

Academic politics can be as damaging to art as it is to science. But the article, with its obfuscating language may not necessarily be an example of academic politics. It may be a sincere attempt to reach into the unimaginable truth, the very core of art's elusive secrets.

I dunno.

I got bored trying to read it. And, as a writer, do I really want to take advice from people I can't read?

Sam Rasnake
Sep 17, 01:38pm

Thanks for posting the link, Andrew.

If John Prine were a member of FN he would write here "It's a big old goofy world" - and he'd be right.

Different strokes. I happened to enjoy the Birkerts' piece. Didn’t agree with all of it - and don't think he's saying anything new in it. What I get from it is transformation as writer and as reader, and for Birkerts - as editor. I’ll focus on one part.

"Basically—short version—a work of prose (or poetry) can no longer assume continuity, not as it could in former times. It cannot begin, or unfold, in a way that assumes a basic condition of business as usual. The world is no longer everything we thought was the case, and the writing needs to embody this—through sentence rhythm, tone, camera placement, or some other strategic move that signals that no tired assumptions remain in place. This writing must, in effect, create its own world and terms from the threshold, coming at us from a full creative effort of imagination and not by using the old world as a prop."

What I find to be true in my own work is that I can't write as I used to. Nor do I read as I once did. And I don't mean that I write or read less. I'm doing both with more intensity than ever. But, the focus is not the same.

Writing does create its own world. Yes. It must. I do believe that.

All this being said – I don’t agree with Birkerts’ take on Wittgenstein because the world is everything that is the case. And language begins and moves through that point. At least mine does. I’ll paraphrase Alan Watts – when I die, the world dies with me.

“But we have to believe that artistic necessity evolves.” Yes.

“All interactions and transactions now take place in a different gravitational field...” Yes.

Birkerts’ entire premise for rejection – “John Maloney hunched his shoulders against the bitter wind coming off the lake.” No.

Actually, the sentence reminds me of the opening line of Birkerts’ book My Sky Blue Trade: “I have on my desk a clump of photocopied sheets, the residue of a project I was at one point very keen on but which I then quite abruptly abandoned.” I envision Birkerts’ shoulders as hunched.

I do happen to believe that reading – in a formal sense ... as a writer, serious reader, editor ... is a personal crossroads. Birkerts didn’t need to read the Maloney piece. He couldn’t walk that road any longer. I’ll quote Hank Williams: “It was exactly where I had anticipated.” That being said, some can walk the Maloney road, and get a great deal in return.

Twelve editors rejected William Stafford’s poem “Traveling through the Dark”. They didn’t like the direction of the piece. Were they correct in rejecting it? For them, they were. But, that didn’t cause Stafford to change one word, and he didn’t and it was published in the Hudson Review. Accepted or rejected – It’s still a great poem. Was Stafford right to stay with it – even though so many turned it down. Yes. As writers, we like what we like. But that’s true for readers as well.

Also, I agree with James about the dangers of academic politics as an intrusion upon the arts. I’ll expand that to all manner of politics as far as I’m concerned. Personality politics, wilderness politics, cause politics... and the list goes on. They all can – and many times do – get in the way. Nothing should deflect the writing away from its own truth.

Really enjoyed Ann’s article on Birkerts and blogs. Especially this point: “It is my impression that many of us in the literary blogosphere are in print, and many are trained. The issue he doesn't mention is pay: how to do it? I have thought that a genius for our time will be someone who invents a way.” Yes.

Much food for thinking in this thread.

Ann Bogle
Sep 17, 03:38pm

Sam, great comment (and thanks for your feedback on my blog entry) and Andrew, this is a good lead.

stephen hastings-king
Sep 17, 04:41pm

A few sentences. First, it isn't possible to run away from history. Statements about it's all-too-frequent ugliness are made from inside it. And there's no outside. There's nowhere to go. We can't even get to the position Ishmael Reed outlined here:

I am outside of history/I wish I had a peanut./It looks hungry there in its cage.

I am inside of history/It was hungrier than I thought.

As Sam points out via Wittegenstein, the world is everything that is the case. Any world is also a form of life. Any form of life is the social-historical. There's nothing PC about asking of people that they confront what's in front of them.

Personally, I think the dominant changes are political and we're watching them happen in an ideological context that doesn't frame them for you as if by doing that they'll just go away like bugs in fall. There is the gradual implosion of the American Empire. There is an unraveling of the remnants of the entire post-1945 socio-economic order. There is a dominant politics based on avoidance of all the above, in almost all its dimensionings. Bikerts, like a lot of people it seems, collapses this onto some vague zeitgeisty hand-waving in the direction of information saturation. It's more likely that among the consequences of the dissolution of dominance is a process of breakdown of information limitation mechanisms (because cognition necessarily leans on the social, even as it is not identical with it). The difference lay in seeing an onslaught of factoids that does not result in any particular accumulation.

On proper names. I don't use them. I stole the idea from Robbe-Grillet. I hope he doesn't mind. Proper names impose location and continuities. If you want to play with identities that are in flux and you assign a proper name to your character, it seems to me that you are working at cross purposes. But people seem to like naming things that way. I don't really get it, but I see it all the time, as I'm sure you do. Maybe it's automatic. Hard to say. The only reason I can say the above, apart from having stolen the device and so having already seem something of what you can do with it, is that I've been playing with it for a while now. That said, I don't see the sense of telling people not to use them. The world is everything that is the case. They simply have effects and those effects can be thought about and thinking about them can put you in a position of making something that may seem automatic into an option that may or may not open up space for you to play in. And that's what these devices seem to me to be about--opening up space to play in.

I'm not real interested in traditional narrative, but I enjoy them when they're done well. I know how they work, and enjoy tampering with their conventions. I'm also not interested in non-linearity for it's own sake. You can't play with time in a non-linear context really. Time deploys via sequence. From that viewpoint, though, any sequence is a narrative. From there, it's a short step to statements about structure that John Cage liked to make, and other statements about the consequences of fixed media that Brian Eno likes to make (well, I don't know about the liking part, because I don't know how much people like saying the same things over many years. Not everyone does, so they stop.) If narrative is merely sequence deployed within a given space or duration, then it too becomes a set of devices to think about and play with.

I may be losing the thread.

What I didn't take from the Bikerts piece is anything that would explain some of the defensiveness above. Write the way that pleases you. Play the conceptual games that you think interesting. In the end, the choices you make are political, but that may or may not be important either in the work or to you as you make things.

Where I live people seem to like painting the same landscapes over and over again. The same seagulls flying over the same watery sturm und drang. The same Motif No. 1 seen in the same way from the same angle. You can go to galleries and see walls full of the same thing, like some strange unintentional Warhol series except without the silk screen stylings. And there are people who seem to like that stuff. They like looking at a painting that is like looking at the same landscape, which they can see maybe a mile or three from the gallery or from over their fireplaces in their living rooms. I don't see the appeal, but then again I don't have to. I don't like bluegrass particularly. But that doesn't mean I don't respect the attention people who do like it put into it's production. I even enjoy hanging around jams. I like the energy. I do other things. People I know here tell me that my stuff demands a lot of the reader. I think they're fun. The just operate in parallel registers. One does not negate the other. There aren't galleries here in the land of angsty seagulls traversing the terrible sturm-und-drag wavy ocean that show more conceptually oriented work. Sometimes I think about making a set of instructions that, if you follow them, would let you produce in your mind exactly this sort of landscape. It amuses me to generate a space in which the argument can be sensed that all this repetition is unnecessary. But I also know people who make these paintings and the care that goes into them. Sometimes we make fun of each other. Other times, we try to figure out why an audience for one type of work does not cross with that for another. By then, we are usually several beverages into the evening and other things come up and we wander off into them.
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