die gegebene Aufgabe: An Editor's Note

by E. Tracy Grinnell

We writers are thieves. I can think of no writer who does not revel in the discovery of some morsel-word, phrase, idea-to be consumed and returned to the page: language digested into language. The language is thus changed by perception and reconfiguration, then passed on to a reader who disentangles the work, and takes something for her/himself. This movement into and through language creates the possibility for a resistance against limits imposed on meaning, and it is through the channels of this resistance that I pass from writer to editor.

The title of this journal is taken from the German to mean work, task, or purpose. The purpose, as set out in the original call for submissions, was to present writing 'that challenges static cultural modes of thinking and being,' as well as to provide readers in this country with a guest edited section of work from another country. While this purpose still remains, the idea that each issue of the journal has its own 'task,' seems to me now too simplistic. The task for me has become one which is perhaps most familiar to the translator: how to negotiate the space between writer and editor, where 'reader' is dually implied. As I began thinking about writing this note, it occurred to me that the task of the editor involves a kind of risk which emerges in this passage from writer to editor.

The risk involved may not actually be one of life and death, but considering Barthes, it may figuratively represent such concerns. If a writer's "only power is to mix writings, to counter the ones with the others, in such a way as never to rest on any one of them," then what is the 'power' of the editor? The obvious answer is that the editor is making such writing available in some format to an audience; otherwise our 'scriptor,' as she dies, would die in obscurity. However, I am interested in the ways in which the line between writer and editor blurs. At times, the line has not seemed so clear. The experience for me of editing an issue is similar, in some ways, to composing a piece of writing. I am presented with writing from multiple sources, and as a reader I slip into the role of disentangling and consuming. I select pieces, fragments, and excerpts from these sources. I arrange and "counter the ones with the others." The assemblage is then passed on to the readers, who now not only must disentangle the language/writing within the journal but the language of the journal itself. And so, in a sense, writer and editor suffer the same demise, and for the same end. Barthes point, of course, is that the reader become active, that the reader participate in the meaning that is made of the text. The particular aesthetics, position(s), politics, of the editor/writer become irrelevant, or at the very least secondary, to the meaning which is made of the text by the reader.

Of course, aesthetics, positions and politics are never entirely irrelevant, and at no point in the movement from one position to another is it possible to avoid participation, for the reader is always implied. In this way, because if one is a writer (or editor, or translator) one is a reader, the politics of the writing and of the presentation of that writing are dependent on one's position in relation to the culture and language in which one finds oneself. And so I pass through the role of editor because the proliferation of spaces wherein one might resist a culture or language that imposes limits on, or dictates, meaning is crucial. The task of creating these spaces is necessarily the responsibility of those readers who insist that the text remain open, as a form of resistance. It has always fallen upon those outside the cultural mainstream to create the space they seek to occupy, to represent themselves where they have not been represented, to insist that language remain flexible, unoppressive, alive.

Small press publishing in all its formats "is the creation…of those poets who have seized or often have invented their own means of production and distribution…something we've demanded as a value that must remain first and foremost under each poet's own control," where the control exercised is not one over meaning, but an insistence on the movement between writer-reader-editor that defends the right to make meaning. So the risk becomes not a personal one but the risk of concession. Writing from where many of us do, an increasingly large margin, it is imperative that the means of production and distribution remain in our hands, that we continue to use whatever means available to present writing that is the product of thinking, disentangling, and resisting. The task at hand is not to stop.

© E. Tracy Grinnell. All rights reserved.