It got quiet here at the QAE blog in the past few months. That’s because we were busy putting together the new issue (if you’ve subscribed, it should arrive in your mailbox any day now). Volume 17 includes a critical feature, “The Future of Creative Writing.” We’ll be excerpting from the many thoughtful essays in that feature here on the blog, but today we’d like to give you a chance to respond to the questions we asked a number of writers:
“Ezra Pound’s admonition to 'make it new' is nearly a century old. The prose poem is over one hundred years old, language poetry is settling into its middle age, even flash fiction and the lyric essay are comfortably familiar; yet these modes dominate our conversations about experiments in literature. We find ourselves in the paradoxical position where radical experimentation has become a predictable norm. Moreover, in recent years the term experimental has been used to describe an increasingly specific range of familiar and canonical forms that emphasize language over narrative and fragmentation over linearity.... Are there are other ways to define experimental writing? What new forms or variations will the next generation of writing bring? Where do we go from here?”
Writers, what do you think? Readers, what do you want to read?
I'm really excited by the way Anne Carson merges academese with lyricism. Maybe she just tickles my cerebral elitism, but I love how her work engages me emotionally and intellectualy.
ReplyDeleteI just picked up the new issue at AWP. I really appreciated what Joel Peckham had to say in his essay on experimental writing. Rather than thinking of his work as innovation or experimentation, he sees his work as "an attempt to enact the problem it is unraveling."
ReplyDeleteYea, I saw that too. I like that. Innovation shouldn't be for the sake of innovation.
ReplyDeleteI’m excited to see how experimental writers (whatever that means) will continue to play with texts, but I worry sometimes that people confuse experimental writing with gimmicky writing. (Though maybe some people don’t see “gimmicks” as a bad thing?)
ReplyDeleteFrom what I’ve seen, Quarter After Eight seems committed to finding content that takes its form to fresh, thought-provoking, and entertaining places—places that exist inexplicably and thankfully free of gimmicks.
Loved the AWP panel!
ReplyDeleteI still get all tingly when someone writes a sonorous line, or when I get the sense that a real live human being is trying to tell me something true, or close to true. Sure, "playing with texts" can elicit at least one or two tingles, but so many textual experiments fall remind me of Randall Jarrell's old adage: written on a typewriter by a typewriter. I long for earnestness, restlessness, and I want it all to sound pretty. Recently (even though it came out in 2009) I liked Heather Christle's book "The Difficult Farm," with some "stop-messing-with-me"-type reservations.
ReplyDeleteI think the tingle-inducing sonorous line is always a consequence of experimentation. I mean, it works because it torques our fixed sense of reality, right? The gimmicks and typewriter writings don't bother me so much, because they seem like attempts to tingle-torque that just didn't work out. They make me tingle in the way that all those crashes in the sand at Kittyhawk make me tingle (with the benefit of hindsight).
ReplyDelete"I think all writing is experimental. The very obvious sort of experimental writing is not really more experimental than that of a conventional writer like myself. I experiment all the time but the experiments are hidden. Rather like abstract art: You look at an abstract picture, and then you look at a close-up of a Renaissance painting and find the same abstractions." ~ William Trevor
ReplyDeleteDinty, Richard Sonnenmoser makes a similar point in his essay... "If you put words on the page without knowing where exactly you’re going, if you’re alive to the possibilities of what the fiction might demand, you belong. It follows, then, that only the writer of experiment knows if there’s in fact been an experiment."
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