Any
correspondence or submissions should be sent to
editors@s4nbooks.com.
Submission Guidelines:
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. |