The monthly email newsletter AGNI sends to subscribers and supporters is worth reading, but as far as I can tell, the mini-essays that editor Sven Birkerts contributes to these newsletters aren’t available elsewhere. Wanting to share these more widely, I’ve elected to re-print some of these newsletter essays here on Ampersand. Enjoy!
- ZB
“AGNI's Own Midnight Madness”
by Sven Birkerts
[The AGNI email newsletter, October 2018.] I've been thinking a lot about the literary arts just recently. I don't mean literary in the already-between-covers-and-on-the-shelves sense. I'm focused, rather, on the poetry and prose now coming to AGNI over the transom.
Pouring in, I should say. On September 1st - as every year - we re-opened our online Submission Manager, which had been closed since the end of May. Opening day always brings a deluge from writers who've been waiting to send work all summer. It's Midnight Madness - quite literally. That's when the sluices open.
Having been out of town for the first few days of the month, I was braced to find more submissions than usual on my return. I was not braced to find 970 lined up in a queue. 970! Screen after screen of stories, poems, and essays - all to to be opened and read, all bearing the invisible good-luck hexes of their authors.
The number shocked me backwards out of my chair. I saw in a flash what I would be doing for the next weeks, maybe months. The thought of so many hours nearly overwhelmed me. But then, as if in compensation, there came a new and more lifting recognition.
It was a recognition, simply, of the unending stream of the new. Having been caught up for years in the unchanging repetitions - click, read, evaluate - I'd all but lost sight of what was - is - going on under that grid: a movement not unlike that of history itself. All of us at AGNI are posted right at the intersection, where private visions meet the cultural moment. I think of myself as a broker, a weatherman.
Energized by the realization, I started in on my reading. And, as always happens, I found myself asking the old questions: What is it that makes for freshness? What compels my deepest attention?
This time the answer was quick in coming. I'm looking for (we're looking for) writing that catches experience before the crusts of habit form - poetry and prose that has a genuine pulse. I'm especially interested in work from younger writers who are not yet curating themselves as a brand-in-the-making. They have the least pre-filtered sense of our times. They are likely to be the most in touch with the atmosphere of the now, the so-called Zeitgeist.
The culture, we know, changes constantly. I've been minding the store here long enough to assert that the work coming to us now is different from ten years ago. How could it not be? A writer's expression encodes the times in all sorts of ways. It foregrounds new themes, tweaks syntax and rhythm, and often tries to veer away from former innovations that have become stale.
Reading, I'm watchful. I can't help but note the subtle changes of tone and the effects that go against expectation. They indicate the particular momentum of the times.
What are writers doing that feels different?
Years ago, I wrote some essays that asked how the features of our flourishing virtual culture would ever find their way into literature. Could our screen-intensive lives be conveyed in interesting ways? Could writers be of the times and also use the materials of the times to create strong narratives? Maybe those writers had the same hesitations, because for more than a few years I saw little evidence of change.
But times are different now. A generation of digital natives has joined the ranks. They're everywhere, striving to render their lives. Reading submissions, I find that Google, YouTube, Twitter, and dating apps are not only part of the subject matter in all three genres, they are affecting modes of narration. Fewer stories and essays, I notice, rely on sequential telling. Lateral association is far more common, perhaps reflecting the logic of the link.
So our fast-changing world presses steadily against the supposedly closed order of the written work. How could it not? We all track the news cycle nowadays, absorbing its energies and anxieties. Submissions have grown more dystopian, and utopian - both. I also see - no surprise - more exploration of the tensions around race, around gender imbalances, around acts of violence and coercion . . .
I also notice more specific trends. I'm reading more "premise" stories - stories in which some unusual situation is set out and then worked through. A man wakes up to find his wife has vanished; a forgotten girlhood friend appears on a woman's doorstep . . . There are dozens of variants, most focusing on actions and reactions in the outer world and steering clear of murkier psychological interiors. I wonder about this. Are we losing the taste for inwardness? And what if we are?
In nonfiction submissions, meanwhile, I'm encountering all kinds of "instruction" or "hermit crab" essays, where a non-literary structure serves as basis: numbered how-to lists - for example, "How to break up with your girlfriend" and so on. I'm also reading many more so-called braided essays, which weave a personal strand together with a counterpoint - about the history of hot-air balloons, say. The expository threads are clearly pulled together from online research. The writer arranges interesting bits to play off of the more personal narration. It's for the reader to integrate the dissonance. Both of these modes seem to me responses to the almost unmanageable complexity of our new world.
Finally, in the poems we receive, I have to remark how many proceed by chopping what are ultimately prose narratives into lines. Freed from formal expectations, the poets seem to ramble garrulously, and the idea seems to be that the digressions are often where the meaning is to be found. The poet trusts that voice and quirky turns will carry the day.
These are only a few of the trends - there are of course others. It's like we are all crossing a rickety bridge across a chasm. We can still see the ledge behind us, but there's no clear view ahead. Writers respond as they need to. Some of the pieces I read feel like old patterns and conceits retooled for fresh uses - true originality is always in short supply. But I also see work that takes on the new unknown in brave and original ways. Stories, poems, and essays arrive that are attuned to what Seamus Heaney called "the music of what happens." This is the needed thing that we want to keep passing along to our readers.
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