Corresponding Authors (Letter 2 of 9)
24 April 2017
Dear Anthony:
I know what you mean about social media making letter writing retrograde. But I agree there is something more valuable in letter-writing or, as you put it, “it seems to matter so much more.” Something feels disposable about facebook; posts of the moment are scrolled away, down the page; all posts blend to one another, the algorithm makes sure I am among my own chamber of pals; and I read online with a different part of my brain. Should anything happen, should I connect, it is brief and there is a sense it will be replaced by the next trend. Yet I can go back and see a post I made years ago. Why does it feel less worthy, less permanent, less of everything? It might be that it is only me – and you – who feel this way, but I doubt it.
A letter is an undertaking. Besides the obvious – that one needs stamps, a pen, paper (artifacts, practically!), one needs time & mental space. There’s also that physical element – ink absorbing into capillary fibers of paper – that suggests some kind of secret relationship enduring. A physical letter is a material thing. Even if I crumple it up and toss it away, or burn it, for me it existed, so it had something of a soul, as silly as that is to write – it continues to have something of a soul.
We use different parts of our brains online, that’s clear. It’s established that online reading goes to a data-focused receptor and that print goes to a deeper part. It’s a less tactile experience, being online, and the material page offers something of a topography, a place to be, a landscape, to me. Online feels like the flat winter of a dream I won’t remember (That’s probably just me.)
I should address – in addition to what I’m saying about the reading of material – I should also address the writing of material. When I sit down to write a letter almost everything about me is different than when I’m online. And when I am writing poetry, it’s even more different.
I very much pictured the letters in Dear Editor as physical letters. In fact, I began the project of those epistolary poems when I was thinking about the difference between the way the mind operates when you’re trying to write poetry, and the way you think when you are writing the standard cover letter to an editor. In the latter case you’re filling out a generic template (“Dear Editor, Please consider these poems, etc.”); you’re using a standard part of your mind, I guess. But when I’m drafting a poem, the “poetry mind” is doing something quite different, wandering and threading out like silks from a spider’s spinnerets. That’s a good metaphor there, because those silks are adhesive, and one thought leads onto another, and before you know it, you are off the subject that began your search, and onto something (hopefully!) more significant.
The first of those Dear Editor poems/letters began because I wondered what would happen if the girl who wrote poems couldn’t turn off the poetry mind when she began drafting her generic letter to the editor? What if her poetry mind just kept on, and invaded that letter, permeated that experience? The Amy Newman in those poems, the Amy Newman of those letters, lives deeply in her wandering. (I doubt she has a facebook page.) We’re alike in a lot of ways – we’re not alike in a lot of ways. But I envy her wandering.
Warmly,
Amy