The Towering Irrelevance

"Literature is sacred. It is as sacred to me as anything I know. I suspect that most editors and agents feel the same way, if only during the quiet hours of the night. But there is always the issue of how one goes about selling the sacred without defiling it. There is the issue of how one goes about superintending the sacred when tens of thousands of fellow brethren, some of them abundantly insane but many of the truest sort of heart, want to add to its flame. What does one tell them? That they are not holy enough? However one personally and professionally elects to handle these troubling issues, a tiny piece of the sacred is ruined. For me, at least, all of this inevitably leads to a small, quiet grief. We would all like for our worlds to be bigger."

Tom Bissell, from his 2003 essay for The Believer, anthologized and published in the book Magic Hours out this April and available here. The essay is much larger and better than this very good paragraph, and has had me making sort-of-exclamatory noises through my nose. But this passage in particular is a good summation of one of the sharper sorrows inherent in my job.

The entire essay also speaks directly, if accidentally, to some of the furor about access that occasionally bubbles up in tumblr poetry spheres.

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