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CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

The Round Magazine is a journal of literature and the arts based at Brown University. The publication includes poetry, fiction, translation, critical essays, and visual art and seeks submissions from both published and unpublished writers. Alongside student writers, issue I also included award winning writers Paul Muldoon and Mary Gordon; in our Spring 2010 issue, the work of graduate and undergraduate students from universities nationwide is published alongside the writing of Brown faculty members Keith Waldrop and Alexander Levitsky.

Inspired by the Literary Philosopher Kenneth Burke’s metaphor of literature as an ongoing conversation, The Round aims to restore this conversation in the literary world today. By restoring this relationship between reader and writer, we may also restore reverence for the written word.

We hope to include more writers at Brown in our endeavor. Our deadline for submissions for our Fall 2010 Issue is April 1st 2010. Works submitted after that date will be considered for the following Spring Issue.

**We will be hosting a second reading at the Brown Bookstore on April 15 in addition to several campus-wide activities. A recent review of our magazine can be found online at:

http://www.newpages.com/magazinestand/litmags/2010_01/litmagreveiws_2010_01.htm

Please direct all submissions and other questions about submitting and/or becoming involved with our publication to TheRoundMagazine@gmail.com

Thank you,

The Editors of The Round

The Conversation Continues...

Dear Mr. Loedel,

Your essay, “A Defense of the Moment,” makes a moving case for why we should understand great art not as the byproduct of individual genius, but as the offspring of dynamic conversation. This fecund conversation, as you construe it, is one between past and present. The chasm between past and present operates by means of synapse, facilitating communication between two disparate ages precisely by granting them space. Yet the danger opened by this gulf, as you note, is that it may become unbridgeable. In your metaphor, taken from Kenneth Burke, the parlor doors may be eternally locked.

Nevertheless, reverberating from the frustrated knocks upon the bolted doors is a profound echo, whose “still small voice” (Kings 19:12) may be more gripping and enduring than the baroque bombast inside. Your primary anxiety, however, is not that we will be debarred from the parlor, but that we will no longer even seek to gain entrance to it. Tragically, but without the consolation of catharsis, you envision that we will no longer even know where the parlor doors stand.

Allow me to dissuade you of your melancholic diagnosis by proposing that there is not one parlor, but many. If we have abandoned certain parlors, we have not at all abandoned the rich conversations which constitute our creative lives, but simply moved to other venues, perhaps ones which are more inviting of all people and which do not require us to check our identities at the door in the posturing, Enlightenment spirit of universalism.

In proposing that there are many parlors, I am not disavowing the greatness of Homer and Shakespeare. These, in fact, are the best examples of poets whose works were as accessible to the aristocracy as they were to the illiterate (thanks to the fact that their works were originally performed rather than read). But, I am contesting that these giants, and the other writers of the Western pantheon, provide the only models of “greatness,” a concept which seems to me rather dubious.

You write,

“[I]t is precisely the timeless in art which creates its value, for it alone can convince the skeptics among us that there is such a thing as life whose Form is as real and undying as that of a circle or the number two” (40).

But, why do you want art to be comparable to the static, eternity of the number two? What is glorious about a truth which is indifferent to those who possess it, whose Platonic perfection renders it unchanging? Literature gains its forcefulness, not as an end in itself, but precisely because it speaks to people. Insofar as it inspires, challenges, undermines or provokes, literature emerges from its Cartesian cocoon into the world, a world filled not with a priori concepts, but desires, hopes, wounds, fears, and beliefs. Only In this messy life “under the sun,” does literature speak. And while certain themes may pervade the literatures of all cultures, these themes are human: curiosity, shame, jealousy, love, friendship, enmity, etc. They seize us not primarily because they are useless, but on the contrary, because they are full of wisdom. Wisdom, for many ancient cultures was a pragmatic category. The village sage did not simply perform logical deductions; he advised people how to live and what to do.

Thus, it is not the detached world of literature which humanity requires— an escape from our technologically, goal-driven cosmos— but an invested world of literature, which opens from within our fallen globe, challenging us, as Shakespeare did, to call into question the very dichotomy between life and theatre.

In his essay, “The Avoidance of Love,” Stanley Cavell asks why we don’t protest when we see Othello strangle Desdemona to death. He argues, provocatively, that it is no excuse to say that Othello is merely “acting,” that he is simply a character on a stage. For do we not show the same indifference to Desdemona as we do to the catastrophic events which circumscribe our everyday life? Do we not open and close the newspaper with the same, swift attentiveness that holds us in our seats between the opening and closing of the curtains? For Cavell, the goal of art is not to take us away from the world but to call attention to the fact that, although we inhabit it, we constantly avoid taking responsibility for it. The tragedy of King Lear is not only the tragedy of a fickle king who cannot bear to love, to be a fragile, mortal human being. It is also our own tragedy, our aversion to acknowledge the people for whom we most care, and our propensity for banishing anyone and anything that could undermine our pathological desire for self-reliance.

The so-called “great” writers of previous generations were not great because they were talented. Nor were they great because they were ambitious. Their “greatness” consisted in their sensitivity to the world’s fracture. The poet, writes Heinrich Heine, is the one whose heart is the fault-line through which the world’s cracks traverse.

We can gain admission into the parlor of tradition not by knocking in vain upon the locked entrance, but by running around back to the open exit. There, we can see that the true party is not in the parlor itself, but in the people who are leaving it, joining our own company as exiles.

The Conversation

A Defense of the Moment

By Daniel Loedel

“Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally's assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress.”

Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form

For many years now the past has seemed dead to us. That is to say the hour seemed late even before today and its writers had arrived. The parlor is empty now but for a rabble of rejectors and some men behind the bar who do not speak because they are only concerned with conserving what parts of the conversation they remember. These ones are always cleaning up, and every now and again they try to throw the rabble out and lock the doors. Some of the rabble then go to a different parlor where a new conversation is stirring, but here the topics seem slighter, the words leaner. Some of us found ourselves listening for a while and decided to leave because we wanted to take part in the other, older conversation. But when we got to the parlor we found the doors had finally locked.

This is the present moment, when the young stand outside a chained pair of small doors deciding if there is a way in. People pass by in the corridors and streets, telling us to go home because over the years they have seen too many waste their time around the doors. We remind them that all writers in the conversation stood outside at some point, even the very best. No one is a prophet in his own time, we say. But this time, the passersby answer, is different. Today we have no need of prophets. And even if we did – you, children, are not prophets.

This, of course, has been said before. And it has been ignored before.

In an essay called “How it Strikes a Contemporary,” Virginia Woolf wrote: “Our age is meagre to the verge of destitution. There is no name which dominates the rest. There is no master in whose workshop the young are proud to serve apprenticeship.” Already we should pause, for the contemporary still is stricken here; Virginia Woolf finds no name of resounding greatness in her age. She finds no notable distinction in the age of James Joyce, William Butler Yeats, Marcel Proust, D.H. Lawrence, E.M. Forster, Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and all the young of that time that we now could praise. The doors to the parlor may have seemed locked in their day as well, for of her contemporaries Woolf says only that:

“Though they are many and vigorous and in the full flood of creative activity, there is none whose influence can seriously affect his contemporaries, or penetrate beyond our day to that not very distant future which it pleases us to call immortality.”

These passages are lovely precisely because we know they are wrong. They are lovely because they allow us to dismiss the notion that a writer is immortal from his or her beginning and reveal, to the contrary, that the very best of artistic times will still seem just a shadow of an even greater past. They reveal, in short, that the present cannot judge itself.

Now, this is hardly a new idea; in his “Defense of Poetry,” Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote, “The jury which sits in judgment on a poet[1], belonging as he does to all time, must be composed of his peers: it must be impaneled by Time from the selectest of the wise of many generations.” Because a writer is judged by the writers of all Time, he is judged by the same writers of the conversation and in relation to their contributions to it. He is judged, as T.S. Eliot once said, by “the standards” of the past: “His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.” The writer of the present who seeks the recognition of the future must respond to the writers of the past. It is in the response to his timeless peers that the writer of the moment gains a place in the conversation. “No poet,” Eliot writes, “no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone.”

Following in the same vein, Eliot’s peer and mentor, Ezra Pound, very famously said, “Make it new.” Contrary to the beliefs of many in our time, this remark was not intended to suggest a rejection of the past; rather, it proposes reconstructing the past in such a way that it become new. The writers of modernity must, in other words, understand the past so well that their responses effectively rewrite it. And thus the past benefits from the present as much as the present profits from the past. “The debt is mutual,” Jorge Luis Borges writes. “A great writer creates his or her precursors.”

The model in this is Dante, who chose the poet Virgil for his guide through the Inferno. The writer had the precursor whom he most admired direct the exploration of his art. However, Dante did not stop there. On more than one occasion, he took the work of his so-called “master,” and actually rewrote it. The bleeding tree of the Aeneid is explicitly reused in the seventh circle of Dante's Inferno, but changed. Virgil's single tree, which sheds the blood of the man buried beneath it, has multiplied into a forest of suicides. Here the bark does not cover the buried, but rather holds their souls and gives them words. Just as Dante endows the tree of the Aeneid with the power of speech, so does he create anew the voice of the past itself. The conversation continues.

We must be careful here, however; for though the past also owes the present, we cannot assume the present will always be as great as the past. Most critics and writers will agree, for instance, that Dante was an exception in the Middle Ages. Though the era saw moments of greatness, many years passed by between them whose potential for such greatness went unfulfilled. These periods lacked the density of literary wonder that is found in Classical Athens or the Golden Age of Rome. Nonetheless, they do reveal the capacity of the present to belong, one day, to that category of immortality which can only be known in the past.

The artist is never born great; the present does not grant him that right. It exists for him only as possibility, like a slab of wood before the carpenter. It is something he must constantly shape and reshape, a step no greater than the moment itself on the way to eternity. As Ezra Pound put it, “The artist is always beginning.”

The procedure of making is never already complete. The artist continually adds to it just as days are added onto Time and words are stacked upon the conversation. No moment of history is more or less suited than another to what we tend to call artistic genius because all moments have that potential inborn to any malleable present.

It is leaving this potential unrealized that causes Woolf to dismiss her present, not its inability to creep out from a looming past. For as she herself notes in the same essay, there is a sort of divinity about one’s own moment from which no artist would dare depart:

“Though we admire the dead, we prefer life as it is. There is something about the present we would not exchange, though we were offered a choice of all past ages to live in. And modern literature, with all its imperfections, has the same hold on us and the same fascination. It is like a relation whom we snub and scarify daily, but, after all, cannot do without. It has the same endearing quality of being that which we are, that which we have made, that in which we live, instead of being something, however august, alien to ourselves and beheld from the outside.”

This essay was first written in 1923; it was written after Ulysses and The Wasteland, before The Great Gatsby and Mrs. Dalloway, and in the same year that Yeats won the Nobel Prize for literature. That is to say it was a year like any other, a year that could, perhaps, have been like ours.

Unfortunately, we must admit there is a difference. In certain respects, the loathsome chatter of today’s passersby remains correct. In Woolf’s day, the doors seemed locked with large chains because the parlor was so full and so revered that no one new seemed able to enter. In our day, no one even remembers where the parlor is. The chains of privilege have fallen from the doors and they are now boarded up like an unused room, or a closet for relics and a few slightly unusual memories. Soon enough the doors may look no different from the doors to a thousand other abandoned rooms, and the parlor itself may stop being a room the young can look for.

But why has this happened, we last wanderers now ask. Why does our age feel out of tune with an almost foreign language of greatness? Why has it fallen from the range of its echoes? And why does it make me ashamed of my own aspiration?

The preface to Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray notably concludes with the statement: “All art is quite useless.” In a strange way, it is this which our day has forgotten.

“All art is quite useless” is not the same statement as “All art is quite worthless.” And as the statement introduces a book whose protagonist wants to make his life into a “work of art,” we can reasonably dismiss the latter interpretation. Indeed, today is quite safe from the meaning of this second statement; enough people still believe art has value. The problem is the type of value they believe it has.

Today art is valuable insofar as it is useful. It is useful for understanding culture, it is useful for understanding the past, it is useful for understanding the future, it is useful for understanding morality, it is useful for understanding ourselves. Even this last use of art is off the mark; for art may indeed be useful in all these ways – in fact I very much believe it is – but nonetheless the purpose of art is not just to be useful. Art is not a means to a different end; it is its own end. This, I believe, is what Oscar Wilde was pointing out and what the world no longer cares to know: Art is important for its own sake.

Today writing is assumed to be merely a medium even to writers. Most applaud its ability for self-expression and, having expressed what they consider true, they cease to care if it is true for anyone else. In some ways they even cease to believe that it can be true for anyone else. And here again we must return to Woolf, whose time continues to suggest the undercurrent of our own, “So then our contemporaries afflict us because they have ceased to believe. The most sincere of them will only tell us what happens to himself. They cannot make a world because they are not free of other human beings. They cannot tell stories because they do not believe that stories are true. They cannot generalize.”

Here someone might stop and raise his voice, accusing me of the same mistake that Woolf had made: she misjudged her moment, such an accuser might say, what makes you think your verdict any different? What makes you think your contemporaries won’t win places in the parlor the way Woolf’s did? Why should they not succeed?

My answer is only that they will not enter the parlor if they do not think it matters, for no one can successfully enter the parlor if there is no parlor of success.

Woolf likely would have said that the writers of her day wanted to take part in greatness, but that only here and there did they succeed. Still, she would admit, they tried; they believed in the parlor and strived to join its members. Today, the quiet thought that a writer might strive to compare himself with the past is a taboo, a sort of vanity that is dishonest to the aims of art. It is no longer just unlikely that someone like me will succeed beyond my day, it is a desire I am contemptfully told to avoid, an indicator that I am not writing for the “right reasons.” But it is not the modesty of a moment which keeps it from revering its maker; it is vanity, rather, which allows a moment to ignore the past in favor of itself. It is only vanity which allows writers to cease being readers. For in any tribute to oneself there is less modesty than in a tribute to another.

The age may no longer have a parlor to revere because the parlor does not seem as immediately useful as the moment itself. Our time in life is too brief to bother with the timeless, some might say. But it is precisely the timeless in art which creates its value, for it alone can convince the skeptics among us that there is such a thing as life whose Form is as real and undying as that of a circle or the number two. It has been behind the beliefs of our greatest thinkers, from the Universal in Aristotle to the Sublime in Kant, but it was Shelley who articulated it most wonderfully: “Poetry redeems from decay the visitations of the divinity in man.”

There is no reason this should cease to be true today. We must continue to believe that no matter how far removed, someone else’s words can still be true of us, and that our words can still be true of someone else. We must continue to believe, as our precursors believed, that writers today still write for readers not yet born. We must believe, as the dead believed, that some words may not die.

The Round has faith in this belief. Taking its name from the musical conversation, The Round creates a space for those who want the chance to respond, both to those who are gone and to those yet to come. I am part of The Round because I want to be part of the conversation, and in The Round I have found others to wait with at the doors.

Many of us might eventually grow satisfied with what legends we have heard and return home or to another parlor. A few of us will remain, however, clinging to that old faith in literature for its own sake and the right to an “oar.” Not all of us will get into the parlor and none of us will ever know who will. Despite the late hour and locked doors, we continue to wait for the jury of years to come around. No one is a prophet in his own time.

Staying true to the nature of conversation and The Round, I will now end where I began:

“It is from the notebooks of the present that the masterpieces of the future are made.”

Virginia Woolf

Many thanks to my co-editors in composing this essay,

Elizabeth Metzger, Frannie Hannan, Sylvia Linsteadt, & Daniel Attanasio

---

[1] Shelley defines poetry generally as “the expression of the Imagination.” Given that, we need not reduce the application of this statement merely to poets; in his terms, poetry might as well define the activity of all artists.

"63rd Street Tunnel" by Julliard Lin

These tunnel walls begin to dome around

our train car when we leave the underground

of Queens and snake into the river’s bed;

inside, the swelling cords of music thread

along the acid-initialed windowpanes,

between the poles whose metal scent remains

like second skin on every palm; his song,

alive, untwists itself against the long

expanse of inner walls; outside is quelled

by iron thrashing like ocean with itself:

These ceilings curve to amplify the sound;

these ceilings curve to hold the river out

that pours its weight against the masonry.

And he sings: “Darlin’, darlin’, stand by me...”

The voice is easy; we ease to a stop —

and hear the dimes inside his coffee

"Instructions for a Self-Portrait" by Jeffrey Landman

Unyoked from look

I want the eye

pulling shadow like a plough:

ox coloured.

Furrows should drape the downs.

The head should be the story

of a limb re-grown each day —

a new word in an old tongue

tried for the first time —

at angle

undiminished.