We’ve often thought the opening verses from the Book of Ezekiel are the best example of what we’re looking for: “Now it came to pass in the thirtieth year, in the fourth month, in the fifth day of the month, as I was among the captives by the river of Chebar, that the heavens were opened, and I saw visions of God.”

The directness of this is astonishing—there is no background material, no introductory chapters before things get going. There is no terror at the possibility of “alienating the reader,” no anxiety over seeming ridiculous or pretentious—there is simply the arresting inspiration of something so important and meaningful and full of emotion and intensity that it needs to be said.

This is what we are looking for.

We were dismayed to find one recent critic, in a book about T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, say that for “them” (Eliot and his contemporaries) “it was axiomatic that a poem communicated ‘emotion’,” while “for us today, a poem is an artifact of language.” While this does seem to be the fashion today, S4N exists partly under the assumption that poetry (or powerful writing in general) isn’t just an artifact of language, but is as good a way as any of expressing emotion, of conveying meaning, of creating meaning, of even (and here the religious aspect of Ezekiel is important) becoming something sacred.

Not to condemn most modern writing for seeming distant and theoretical, or simply happy to wallow in irony (or happy to merely shock with its contents), but it’s not what we’re looking for—the poems or novels weighed down with a complexity that usually only reveals the strange anxiety that “words” don’t mean anything anyway. As Ezra Pound remarked in 1937 (though we would be kinder to the work he was condemning), “Nothing would be worth plowing through like this, except Divine Vision—and I gather it’s not that sort of thing.”

We want “that sort of thing”—we want some stab at Divine Vision. We inevitably look back to much older works to find this—the Ancient Near Eastern authors of Gilgamesh, the earliest Egyptian burial rituals, or Jewish scripture; the Hindu Rig Veda and Upanishads; Greek tragedy, Roman historians, Virgil and Dante and the Norse Eddas. But writers of recent memory also come to mind—Dostoevsky, Whitman, Joyce, Jeffers, Eliot and Stevens.

In this way we aren’t too particular on what you send us, if any of the above has resonated. We are looking for any writing at all that has the spirit of the works we’ve mentioned—poems, novels, nonfiction, etc..

Send any submissions to editors@s4nbooks.com.