Printed Matters

There’s probably never been a more compelling time to be a writer than now. There are more ways of becoming a writer, and getting published, instantly, than have ever presented themselves in the history of the world.

As a writer, and a teacher of writing, I’m generally pleased by this. The ability to write well is an essential skill in the (dis)information age. As German-Jewish cultural critic Walter Benjamin noted, during the direst circumstances of the Nazi ascension, “Speech conquers thought but writing commands it.” Up against the clutter and diversion of an image-obsessed public arena, bare knuckle wrangling with the written word is still the best way to clarify one’s thinking, to distinguish what’s true and real from millhouses of bluster and fluff.

As an editor, though, I have grown wary. Writing is one thing, and publication something else. When it’s a bit too easy to get your work out into the public domain, readers, even careful ones, have more trouble discerning the tree from the sound it makes, falling in a faraway woods. The Internet has had a twofold effect on writing: It diminishes the value of publication (simple supply and demand here), while simultaneously stoking the rush to publish. The temptations for a writer to get quick notice are thick, which means a whole lot of immature work gets out when it should be returning to the forest floor to decompose into soil.

When I was starting out as a poet in the 1980s (not so long ago, really) every poem I published seemed hard-won, a real merit badge. I’d spend hours in the library leafing through periodicals, trying to discern what the editors were looking for, listening into the conversations they were cultivating.

Foraging among these publications became a necessary ritual. They gradually pulled me outside my own predilections, until I felt a part of something larger and ongoing. I didn’t like everything I came upon, but I would often think over what the editors had assembled—how it fit together, how it scaled against the deeper currents the editors were nursing or neglecting in American letters. I’d carry certain poems for weeks, until the next issue fell out of the sky. In these journals, I first found affiliation, a locus of communal memory, an empathetic lift.

Now of course there are thousands and thousands of places to publish online—a new one born every minute. In such an era of abundance, when it’s so much easier for a writer to exhibit, and a reader to click and leave, I often wonder what anyone retains, beyond a circumscribed joy, a pat on the back. Yes, it’s possible to read and admire a poem or a story for its stand-alone qualities. But the compositional pressures that produce the best writing aren’t instantaneous. They are allusive, accumulative, tied up in tones that run like rip-tides through a writer’s hands.

The web—with its needful novelty, its top of the head, off-the-cuff rapport—might be more narrow an aperture than it seems. When everything’s available, what gets through?

Think about it. Do we browse the Internet for new writing of the sort we might encounter in the guts of top-notch journals like The Atlantic or Tin House? Or do we click as directed by tweet or status update? At the risk of sounding churlish, it sometimes seems that the social media glut has turned us into minnows darting back and forth in a torrent of information—seeking a flash of recognition here and there, without purchase. Instead of chasing truth through language, we are after our own tails.

The homogenized solipsism of digital overload is a matter of growing concern. When the point of contact between reader and writer shifts away from the colloquy of the editorial arrangement and almost wholly into the orbit of a writer’s self-promotional apparatus, each individual instance of publication online creates a pressure to be visible, to be credentialed, to be linked. Meanwhile, readers lose an important dimension of the literary conversation.

A poem in The New Yorker doesn’t simply float in space. It becomes a subtle commentary on the prose assembled around it. In the best cases, it’s a slow motion dialogue with the editors, a nurse log for new ideas. Back online, we don’t dwell on context. We skim. We move on, the next item calling, our attention spans shortening by the second.

It’s not that writing shouldn’t be available on the web. But in a climate of shrinking literacy, of digital facility built on collective amnesia, the printed page is like a sanctuary. I want readers and writers alike to enter into that silence, to identify or argue with not just each other, but with a third party, the voice and editorial vision of the journal, the magazine, that particular current in the great flood of literature from which the poem or essay first leaps into view, thrashing upstream, spending all its years of reserve on a last ditch effort to leave its mark on your mind.

“Only if poets and writers set themselves tasks that no one else dares to imagine will literature continue to have a function,” Italo Calvino writes.

Good writing of any sort is anti-solipsistic. It connects us, solitude to solitude, trade to trade. It allows us to enter into other lives on the deepest levels, where complexity thrives. It invites us, as Calvino also writes, to “escape the limited perspective of the individual ego,” even to “give speech to that which has no language.”

Or, as Dean Young puts it: “all information is useless.” Until a writer has shaped it into a voice, an editor into a biome, a tradition. And this takes a lifetime of trying.

Kevin Craft is the editor of Poetry Northwest. He teaches English at Everett Community College and creative writing at the University of Washington’s Summer in Rome program.