“His letters are not simply a wonderful adjunct to his poems, but a vital and valuable part of them: they often serve as testing grounds for his theories and ideas, and always blend spontaneity and calculation in a way which allows us to see him in the round.”

There are many reasons why poets take up other forms of writing. Not the least is a practical aspect. John Ashbery once pointed out that he, like most poets, can only write poetry for an hour or so per day–and so what to do with the rest of the hours in a day? Poets often write prose simply for the love of writing.

Baudelaire instructs us to “Always be a poet, even in prose.” Writing prose can be for some poets what it is for a specialized athlete to visit the gym–a way to stay limber and fit. But there are other, deeper needs fulfilled by supplementing poetry with prose. Keats’s letter writing is analogous to the modern phenomenon of poet-bloggers. And clearly, there are some timeless impulses held in common between the two.

One is the need for directness. Andrew Motion points out that “in his poems Keats cultivates a language which is carefully distanced from normal discourse. In his letters he writes with brilliant directness.” The gap has closed in most modern poetry between the diction of poetry and the diction of direct address (and now some poets even experiment with Tweets or, like Paul Muldoon, craft poems in the form of text messages). Yet despite the plainspoken nature of contemporary poetry, the art of poem craft differs considerably from impromptu direct address. Poetry is inherently self-conscious in that it is word-conscious and form-conscious–even in free verse.

By contrast, a letter from John Keats would contain, according to Motion, “freely associating inquiry and incomparable verve and dash–a headlong charge in which jokes, anecdotes, ‘little bits of news’, snatches of bawdy, imitations of comic Shakespearian garrulity, mockery and gossip are swirled together with poetic ‘axioms’ and subtle deliberations.” This sounds a lot like blogging to me.

Another need the epistle (be it letter or blog) fulfills is the motivation of audience. Poetry can be a lonely art. Modern audiences represent a fraction of the general populace, and even communities of fellow poets have divided into thin aesthetic slivers within this already small pie. Don Marquis is credited with saying that “publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose-petal down the Grand Canyon, and waiting for the echo.” Writing a letter, or publishing a blog, is far more certain to draw an audible response.

And so, many poets fulfill their deeper needs for directness, engagement, and a sense of audience through epistolary communication–be it sealed in an envelope, rolled in a bottle, tied to a pigeon toe, or uploaded–like this!–to a blog.

Related Posts:

John Keats, Book Vandal

Culture is the key to a great program

I flipped open my copy of Poets & Writers this month to discover that Pacific University’s MFA in Writing Program has ranked fourth among the top low-residency MFA programs in the U.S., edging up one place from last year. Congratulations to the faculty, students, and staff who made this possible. What is remarkable is that the Pacific program has only been around for a handful of years, as compared to the three programs ranked above it (Bennington since ’94, Warren Wilson since ’76, Vermont College since ’81) and the one program it surpassed in these particular rankings this year (Antioch, started in ’97).

My theory about the secret to this program’s twenty-first-century upstart success is, once again: faculty, faculty, faculty.

What happens when you assemble talent such as the Emeritus Flannery O’Conner Professor of Letters from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the director of the Ph.D. Program in Literature and Creative Writing at USC, and the founder and poetry program director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at SDSU (just to name a few) is that the program obviously benefits directly from the contribution of such outstanding writers and teachers. But more than this, having not only such a talented but well-connected core faculty naturally and automatically attracts other first-rate writing teachers into the program.

By rapidly attracting great faculty, the program made a name for itself with its debut in the Atlantic Monthly rankings as one of the top five low-residency programs. This led to an explosion in the quality and quantity of new student applicants, acquisition of more first-rate faculty, and overall program growth. The greatest challenge that comes with such rapid growth is maintaining the outstanding culture that precipitated the program’s early success. Culture is critical because maintaining a diverse, congenial environment where faculty can do what they do best with a minimum of politics and pretension creates an ecosystem wherein writing students are bound to thrive.

As in business, culture trickles down from the top. Kudos, three years on from the program’s Atlantic Monthly debut, to Dean Hayes, Program Director Shelley Washburn, and the core faculty–for sustaining a positive culture in the Pacific University MFA program, continuing its reputation as a great place to teach and therefore, by extension, a great program overall.

E-books are harder to burn...

I asked for an Amazon Kindle for my birthday. Like Ebenezer Scrooge in “A Christmas Carol,” I have been haunted ever since. In my dreams, I visit the destitute families of the former owners of small, independent book stores. The youngest, a cripple, gives thanks before a paltry meal, declaring, “God bless us, every one–even that mean old Mr. Peake, the last person on Earth we thought would betray the printed book!” I wake in a sweat.

And yet, it is precisely because I love literature that I decided to try buying it digitally. None of the typical reasons for e-books really tipped me over the edge. Nor did the counter-arguments counteract the most compelling reason I have to take the plunge. Our small cottage is lined with book shelves. We moved five times in five years during the U.S. housing boom, when landlord after landlord decided to sell at the end of our one-year lease. That meant schlepping dozens of bankers boxes full of books–heavy books!–from one home to the next.

As a teenager, I watched “Brother Sun, Sister Moon” repeatedly. This 1970s Zeffirelli bio pic of St. Francis, complete with a soundtrack by Donovan, features the overacting of Graham Faulkner as the crusader-turned-saint. The scene that stayed with me is the moment of Francis’ enlightenment, when he strips naked and begins flinging his worldly possessions–and those of his rich father–out the window, into the arms of a receptive crowd of peasants below. That’s pretty much how I left college (though I kept my clothes.) And, while I miss my record collection (and my parents could have used the futon), the idea of simplifying my possessions–if not to enlighten myself, at least to lighten my stance–remains compelling.

And so, far from an argument against books, I have convinced myself that I love books so much, I want to (easily) take them with me wherever I go. My English wife tells me one of her greatest regrets about emigrating to America was leaving behind reams of piano sheet music. We are now investigating the feasibility of an iPad as a music-reading device. To me, just about everything else in the e-books-versus-real-books debate is a wash–you save a few trees, but perpetuate the hazardous metals in e-waste (and not just in the reading device, but in the “cloud” that supports it); you can search and share, but give up the real-world feel of books; you accelerate the demise of indie book shops at the same time you usher in a new era of ubiquitous accessibility to literature.

In short, it seems less a question of “whether” I would go digital, but more accurately “when?” In pursuit of simplicity and freedom, that time is now. Friends and family chipped in, and the new Kindle, appropriately colored black like my heart, is now on back order. I may hate the thing. But I doubt it. Like any new development in literature, I approach the Kindle with an open mind. And to those who think I should do otherwise, I say, “humbug.”

New Mexico represents a spiritual home to me much more than the barren Mojave desert where I spent the remaining eleven months of each formative year. As such, I wanted to bring my wife here more than anywhere. And I brought my adult self, too, as a bemused observer, along with a paperback copy of Christian Wiman’s collection of essays entitled Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet.

This place is dense with evocative glimpses of earlier selves. I have been rifling through internal snapshots like an old-time flip book, hoping the rapid succession of annual impressions might create a trajectory of motion that I could identify as “my development.”

In grandma’s framed collections of family photos that line the walls, I could find no evidence of what I looked like toward the end of my visits here–dyed blue hair, dressed religiously in black punk rock band t-shirts, jeans, and combat boots, with a ring dangling from the center of my nose like a cartoon bull. Still, I recall her shock, and even sadness, the first time she encountered what must have been to her a stark transformation from one year’s grandson to the next.

“I turned out all right,” I reassured her, and my mother, over coffee this morning, “and it helps me to remember that when I see other young people acting strange.”

True, I was disenfranchised then. But I was not rebelling against a loving family or fortunately engaging public-school education; I remained a good son and student, at least until college. Instead, I was manifesting something deeper than hormones or a desire to fledge–a lapsarian sense of separateness that Wiman describes in some poets as “feeling themselves wrong.”

If I had read the first half of Ambition and Survival as a teenager, I would have no doubt simplified his arguments to the all-too-common idea that, if I wanted to be a poet, I should learn to be poor and travel a lot. Instead, I read Emerson growing up, who gave me the impression that all travelers were simply running from themselves. So I spent long hours in meditation and introspection, and felt superior in my small-town way.

Unlike Wiman, I never wanted to be a poet. I wanted instead, from an early age, to master myself, and went through form after form in pursuit of mastery–chess, archery, painting, fiction–trying to find “my thing,” the daimon that would carry me through to transcendence. Like all children, and especially teenagers, I never questioned my survival. Nearly all of my suffering was internal–me pitted against my own laziness, struggling to become “great.”

After the death of our infant son, I returned to poetry, not for any greatness, but out of necessity, discovering what Gregory Orr put succinctly in the title of his book: Poetry as Survival. In his central essay, Wiman touches not only on poetry as a survival skill, but also recognizes the need for poets to transcend this relationship–to bring about in their work “a peace that surpasses understanding,” that they might therefore bring momentary solace to readers as well. Orr likens this to the shamanic tradition in which the wounded become magic healers; Wiman’s Biblical reference to an otherworldly peace springs from his roots in Christian evangelism.

For my own part, I liken this greater impulse toward poetry to the Tibetan tradition of creating sand mandalas. These elaborate creations in colored sand are painstakingly rendered, regarded, contemplated, and then swept back into nothingness as a reminder of impermanence. Yet I imagine the experience for the mandala-maker, and know for myself as one fortunate enough to have once seen an enormous sand mandala on display, can be transformational.

I am grateful to Wiman for looking deeply into himself to bring this testament forward, even as it helps me to retrace my own steps on the journey from ambition to necessity, and beyond survival into a now deep-felt desire to give back what is mine to give into the affirming conversation of poetry.

“I turned out alright,” I repeat to myself here in the upstairs study, surrounded on three sides by views of blue-green pine trees, as another cloud drifts over the roof, spattering the sound of rain. I have the other half of Wiman’s book to get through, and plenty more to think about and write. But for now, I have sequestered myself here long enough. Time to head downstairs, to join the voices around the kitchen table, laughing.

“To fully understand poetry, we must first be fluent with its meter, rhyme and figures of speech, then ask two questions: 1) How artfully has the objective of the poem been rendered and 2) How important is that objective? Question one rates the poem’s perfection; question two rates its importance. And once these questions have been answered, determining the poem’s greatness becomes a relatively simple matter.”

A recent comment by a fellow poet on my post about negative capability got me thinking about the dance between the known and the unknown in the creative act. Alejandro Escude points out that some poets seem to “have something to say and say it” rather than adopting a “neither here nor there approach.” He mentions poets in either camp that share certain stylistic qualities with their comrades in the same camp. And while I agree that William Stafford writes a very different kind of poetry than Sharon Olds, I still believe that it is actually negative capability that makes both of them first-rate poets.

In an early scene of the film version of Dead Poets Society, Robin Williams encourages his students to rip out the introduction to their set-text poetry anthology written by the fictitious J. Evans Pritchard, PhD. Dr. Pritchard’s essay is a striking, if hyperbolic, example of how literary criticism can stray so far from the creative act as to reduce the experience of a poem to an exercise in mathematical graphs. The repeated use of the word “objective” in relation to poetry–its “importance,” and how “artfully” it is “rendered”–makes me laugh every time.

Yet poets do set out with, if not a concrete objective, often a burning image or idée fixe.  I think of this as the gnostic aspect of writing–the light splashed on the wall of the cave that entices us forward. It also includes everything along the way that the artist brings by way of knowledge, and the cognitive-intellectual elements that manifest in the poem.

By way of analogy with theology, gnosis also means “a special knowledge of spiritual mysteries.” (OED) I contrast this with nescience, which literally means lack of knowledge but, again in an ontological vein, can also mean, “agnostic; asserting man’s necessary ignorance of the ultimate constitution of the universe.” (OED) If we take “the universe” and its “spiritual mysteries” to be represented in miniature by the poem itself, then the dance between gnosis and nescience can be thought of as the act of creation itself.

It is nescience, though, above all, that allows this little universe to find its shape. As much as a poem can sometimes seem to write itself, through a white-hot moment of inspiration, still the act of writing is a process of unfolding–the poem revealing itself, line by self-aware line, first to the author, then to the world. As Robert Frost is often quoted as saying, “no surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.” Surprise can only happen when one is willing to not know.

And so, far from just milquetoast dithering, negative capability is what actually makes poetry poetry–letting in the strange, unforeseen resonances, the “precious nonsense” that makes even the most mundane or straightforward subject transcend its existence in words. For all the sense of rightness, fierceness, and concrete meaning a poem can convey, in the messy act of its making, I believe authors of every stripe trip lightly between “special knowledge” and “necessary ignorance.”

“I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart’s affections, and the truth of imagination.”

In my life, my writing, and my appreciation of literature, I strive for awareness and understanding. I have done so in my life through the disciplines of theology and philosophy, in my writing through the tutelage of other writers, and in my appreciation of literature through the study of literary criticism. I have engaged each discipline, formally and informally, throughout my life. And so, I am myself one common denominator among these fields.

That said, I also recognize a dynamic interrelationship: my life influences my writing, and my writing influences my appreciation of the written word; conversely, my appreciation of the written word influences my writing, and my writing influences my life. With this interconnection in mind, I am also beginning to discover, and attempt to articulate, an important principle held in common among the three.

It stems from a phrase coined by an eighteenth-century English poet named John Keats, who said:

…at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously–I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.

Keats was referring to the act of writing. I have found that my own ability to remain in the uncomfortable company of “uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts” while writing poems puts me in contact with the creative power of the unconscious mind. Poets have been practicing this art of creative contact, and explaining the process, in various ways for quite some time.

A recent modern example is the American poet William Stafford, who said:

…receptive, careless of failure, I spin out things on the page. And a wonderful freedom comes. If something occurs to me, it is all right to accept it. It has one justification: it occurs to me. No one else can guide me. I must follow my own weak, wandering, diffident impulses.

He goes on, in the brief essay “A Way of Writing” from his collection of essays Writing the Australian Crawl, to describe in simple, colloquial terms, his own cultivation of Negative Capability in the writing process.

I discovered, too, that resisting “irritable reaching after fact & reason” also opened up a deeper understanding of literature to me. On the first day of my junior seminar in poetry with Stephen Booth, we read William Blake’s “The Tiger”. Professor Booth asked if there were any questions. I raised my hand timidly, and said that while the lines, “When the stars threw down their spears,/ And watered heaven with their tears” were my favorite part of the poem, I did not feel that I fully understood their literal meaning.

He proceeded, rather than chastening me for my lack of knowledge, to expand upon the significance of my statement–that one can find profound aesthetic enjoyment in something one does not totally literally understand. He then asked me if I understood why I did not understand. When I said no, he proceeded to demonstrate his theory of “precious nonsense” using these lines–showing that often what attract us aesthetically to a literary work are the ways in which its elements simultaneously do and do not make sense.

The highest aim of a literary critic, he pointed out, is to simply explain why a poem affects us as it does. In this way he taught me to become a participant-observer in the process of reading, basing my criticism on experience rather than simply layering on abstract theories. There is a particular quality of attention, that requires both abiding and actively observing the “uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts” within oneself as prompted by the piece, that I have found essential to my relationship to literature on both sides of the pen.

But it is applying the principles of “negative capability” and embracing the “precious nonsense” of everyday living that has proved my greatest challenge. And here the stakes are not a term-paper grade or poetry prize, but my very happiness. In a world fraught with contradiction, my mind wants to compartmentalize its elements, to avoid the cognitive dissonance that comes from, for example, perceiving so-called “good” people doing so-called “bad” things (and the other way around). Yet it is by cultivating an ability to abide uncertainty, to admit, as I did to Prof. Booth, that I so often simply do not know–that I have been able to free myself, moment-to-moment, from the intellectual anguish of trying to parse the world, like a chess board, into squares of black and white.

This fundamental capability–to embrace seeming paradox, cultivate subtlety, and dwell more comfortably in the vast unknown–seems to me one of the greatest gifts art can bestow. Because for me art makes life liveable, I have often referred to poetry as a survival skill. Now I am beginning to understand that it is a transferable skill in that it cultivates negative capability. It has helped me to come to terms with, and even synthesize, seemingly disparate elements in business, relationships, and life. Perhaps most counter-intuitively, this power begins in the humble act of embracing that I do not know.

“There are keener griefs than God. / They come quietly, and in plain daylight, / Leaving us with nothing, and the means to feel it.”

Though this year’s edition of Poetry International is packed with poetic delights, the portfolio section on Christian Wiman knocked me out. Though the name sounded familiar, I recalled little of Wiman, except I suspected that by admitting this publicly, I would be admitting a hefty dose of ignorance. (My instincts here were right; turns out he’s the editor of Poetry. I even quoted one of his essays in a post I wrote last year.)

But the upside of ignorance is an untainted first impression, and here is mine: that I found a poet unabashedly touching upon God with neither irony nor simple-mindedness, sounding out complex and compact verse with intoxicating musicality. Here, I thought, is a modern Gerard Manley Hopkins completely unafraid to strike his note.

Here also, I thought, in fact, are the kind of poems I might one day write myself if I knew I did not have much more time to live. With this strange thought fresh in mind, I Googled Wiman, mostly to see if I could pre-order his third book, Every Riven Thing. Instead I discovered an article in The American Scholar, wherein he describes how falling in love and, soon after, being diagnosed with a terminal disease led him back to the fierce new kind of poetry now resting in my lap.

I was led back to poetry by the love and death of our infant son. And from here I deepened my commitment to my spiritual studies, as well as my poetry, as a way to survive the sometimes crushing grief. And yet I must ask myself: why wouldn’t I write this fiercely, and openly, about the grandeur and mystery of my own riven cosmology, complete with its epistemological ruptures and transcendent griefs and joys? Reading Wiman spurs me forward in this way.

And so, I have just ordered his aptly titled Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet from Powell’s Books, and will await the release of Every Riven Thing with interest. Meanwhile, for those curious, two of Wiman’s poems are available in the online edition of Harvard Divinity Bulletin (Winter 2008). At this stage, all I can say is “thank you,” first to Wiman for making spiritual music in a medium obsessed with secular speech, and second to my own naive instincts, which led me to this personally significant new vein of gold.

“Revision is not cleaning up after the party; revision is the party.”

“Sometimes the best revision of a poem is a new poem.”

Poets use words to make art. Each poem is a combination, not only of words, but of decisions made consciously and unconsciously by the poet. Revision is the process of returning to a draft to make different decisions. This process is fundamental to a poet’s development, since it not only affects the poet’s decisions in relation to the poem she is immediately revisiting, but affects her future decisions in composing and revising new poems.

The appreciation of poetry is largely a matter of taste. Therefore the idea that poetry consists of the “best words in the best order” can not be considered in the context of some universal, objective “best.” Rather, it is a personal best one is always striving toward as a poet, to bring forward what is uniquely one’s own, and therefore ultimately only the poet herself can decide what constitutes a “better” decision in relation to her poem.

And yet, paradoxically, it is through input from other self-aware readers that poets can often develop most quickly, learning through feedback how their decisions affect a receptive other. Through both giving and receiving input on poems, the poet also increasingly learns to act as this receptive other for herself in composing and writing her own poems. This is why workshop groups can provide a powerful boost to the development of any writer, and especially poets.

Yet, due to the subjective nature of poetry, and the inevitable realities of interpersonal dynamics, workshop groups can tend toward consensus, which favors the safety of the known, and therefore tends toward mediocrity. However, by focusing on the poet’s specific decisions, and the effect of those decisions upon a receptive, intelligent reader, the poet can be given useful feedback. This feedback is not so much on what a reader may or may not have liked, but is instead about what is and is not working in relation to the poet’s intent–or, at least, what the poet themselves likely experienced when they first re-read their own poem. It thereby becomes a process of aesthetic calibration, comparing one’s own experience and intent to the experience of respected peers.

The following set of questions, arranged in three categories, can be used by groups or individuals to generate input on a poem. They are best used in order.

The first question deals with an aspect of poetry sometimes ignored in contemporary workshop groups–the form, or lack of form, that a poet has decided to adopt in writing the poem. The second and third questions deal with content and mood, respectively. Billy Collins is supposed to have said that the problem with beginning poets is that they are “clear when they should be mysterious, and mysterious when they should be clear.” Differentiating feedback about “what happens” in contrast to “what is evoked” by a poem can help the poet to understand the extent to which they are communicating effectively in these two distinct aspects of writing.

1. What is the form?

Does the poem employ meter? Syllable count? Does the poem employ a rhyme scheme? What about internal rhyme? Is the poem in stanzas? How many? Are they composed of equal-length lines? Are the lines of roughly the same length? Are they long or short? Does the poem use traditional syntax and grammar? Does the poem employ the sentence as a unit of thought? If so, are lines enjambed? Are the first words of each line capitalized?

2. What happens in the poem?

Is there a narrative in the poem? If so, what seems to be happening? Can you summarize the events of the poem?

Even if the poem does not seem to have any narrative (and especially if it does): who is speaking? Is there more than one speaker? What are they speaking about? To whom?

3. What is evoked by the poem?

What is the tone of the speaker? Does the tone change?

What else is hinted at, but not declared, by this poem?

What is the mood? How do you feel when reading it? Does this feeling change?

As you can see, these questions are suitable to engage even elementary readers in some form of discussion. It avoids the unhelpful and sometimes conversation-stopping question “What is this poem about?” entirely, focusing instead on form, events, and mood. If some terms are unfamiliar, this provides a good opportunity for a workshop leader or to introduce formal and literary concepts.

These same questions can also provide structural guidance even to advanced individuals or workshop groups, reminding them of some subtle distinctions in the art of giving and receiving helpful feedback (including to oneself.) Ultimately, the ability to give and receive feedback well lends itself to an improved ability to revise one’s work, which in turn leads to the ability to craft more compelling and meaningful poems. Hopefully, asking these questions can help you to take a few more steps along that path.

The Magna Carta

One of my poems, “Recipe for the Broken“, is a finalist for inclusion in the Goodreads July newsletter. The newsletter is sent by email to over two million members of this social networking website for book lovers. As far as I know, that is a far greater circulation than even the most popular literary journals in print can boast. Apart from the exciting opportunity to reach a wider audience, I also decided to submit a poem as a kind of participant-observer in my ongoing informal research into alternative modes of publishing.

The contest goes like this: poets submit a single poem on the website, and from scores of submissions an editorial team picks six finalists to go on to a round of open voting. You can read the finalist poems for this month here and vote here. You need to be a member of Goodreads and also the ¡POETRY! group on Goodreads in order to vote. Voting ends, in this case, at midnight on July 2nd. Only the first-place poem is published in the email newsletter.

This is one example of the ongoing democratization of poetry–not only because it involves voting, but because it involves more generally the dissolution of intermediaries between author and reader. Laura Miller has a compelling argument for why similar trends, like the rise of self-publishing, are not necessarily such a good thing. As the intermediary “gatekeepers”–editors and publishers–are increasingly circumvented, the burden of discovering good writing shifts to the already overwhelmed and distracted reader.

James Fallows also recently detailed, with his signature blend of intelligence, curiosity, and crystal-clear prose, why and how a company like Google, iconic for its ability to democratize (and thereby collapse) whole industries, is going out of its way to help poetry’s sensible cousin, journalism. Google’s premise is that good journalism is a form of content necessary to the web search engine giant’s own survival, and that high-quality investigative journalism is critical to the success of actual, governmental democracies. They contend that the journalism industry is experiencing not a lack of demand, but a lack of efficiency that will ultimately right itself. In the interim, however, to prevent or at least minimize a dark age of poor-quality and fragmented news, Google is extending a helping hand to newspapers everywhere.

Who, I wonder, is helping literature in general, and poetry specifically?

Dave Gessner points out another aspect of poetry’s democratization–that is, “we are all poets now.” Social media has revolutionized our relationship to the art of words, and to the art of relating to one another through words–rewarding brevity and wit. Thousands of Emily Dickinsons who might, in a previous age, have been content to lock their scribblings away in a hope chest are now getting into the game. And, whether or not you think some of it ought to have stayed locked up, or at least been run past an editor first, the trend toward sharing poetry online is irreversible.

And so, in the absence of some greater deus ex machina, perhaps we are the very saviors we have been looking for. As we writer-readers forge relationships of trust and shared taste with one another, perhaps we can replace the former “gatekeepers” of literary merit–not with a large conduit for unfiltered trash–but with pass-it-along networks where good writing advances through new “mini-gatekeepers” with earned reputations for advancing quality writing to a receptive audience.

Let us not forget, though, that pure democracies undermine minorities and enforce conformity. That is why the most successful governmental democracies make provisions for the individual, and delegate governance to elected officials, instead of relying on majority votes alone. Much like understanding an agreed-upon set of principles for governance (such as a constitution), likewise some degree of formal or informal cultural education is a prerequisite to the appreciation of art. And even as complex laws are put before experienced legislators, so too must there still be some form of “gatekeeper” involved in the championing of literature and literary ideas.

Whether these “gatekeepers” and “mini-gatekeepers” will come in the form of a new breed of tech-savvy editors at independent and university presses, through the increased reputability of online forms of publishing, or, most likely, both–one thing is clear: we are in a time of great change and upheaval, as writers and readers of art-made-out-of-words seek to connect in a world made startlingly smaller and faster by the proliferation of ones and zeroes.