The world has gone digital. It’s a tiresome thing to say, but for an industry like publishing that often hinges on the hope that readers still want to buy physical books, it bears repeating. Sitting on a couch and reading ink on paper now represents a serious outlier in how people consume content, and it’s not a reach to say that a print book might be the only reading (or listening, or watching) a person does without a device in a given day. Yes, there are e-books, a great innovation—but hardly the final version of what electronic book publishing should and will look like. We only need to examine how shorter-form publishers are adapting in order to see the legitimately endless (and necessary) possibilities. Look at how visual poetry has started blending with new technologies as a means of not just presenting but enhancing the form. Or take Jennifer Egan’s story “Black Box,” published by The New Yorker in 2012. “Published” is an interesting term here: the 8,500-word story first ran as a serialized set of tweets over a ten-day span. That successful experiment represents a major, recognizable print publisher trying something completely new, with content from a high-profile author to boot. So which publisher is going to be the first to take a high-stakes leap into a new form of digital publishing with a full-length book? And which author will be the one to risk his or her content in these uncharted waters?

So much of book publishing is based on precedent, track records, and risk aversion, all of which make innovative leaps difficult. But if what we’re starting to see from online magazines and journals is any indicator, the e-book as we know it is just the beginning.

Rain Taxi’s best pieces on innovative digital publishing from 2012:

“Twitter Mind: on Jennifer Egan’s ‘Black Box’” (Fall 2012, Online) by John Parras, about The New Yorker’s Twitter serialization of Egan’s short story

Review by Allie Curry of Cutting Across Media by Kembrew McLeod and Rudolf Kuenzli, (Winter 2011/2012, Online) discussing the new frontier of copyright law in the digital age

Transmission: Technology, Spirit, and Embodied Self in Recent Visual Poetry (Spring 2012, Online) by Jay Besemer, on visual poetry’s expanding possibilities with modern technology

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Writer’s block is a problem we give ourselves. Now, that’s not to say it isn’t real. Anyone who’s ever tried to write consistently has come up against a dry spell, when no ideas are coming, when the ideas we have seem flat, or when we lose faith that we can execute the concepts we actually like. Much of this stems from the genre or form-based boxes writers tend to put themselves in, so it’s no wonder that when the exact route of our choosing feels creatively closed to us, we feel trapped. But this sense of being stuck really just means we aren’t looking around enough, and this is where experimental and innovative writing can serve a vital role.

Take the writers featured in the pieces below. Kenneth Goldsmith tested the limits of poetry by directly transcribing a year’s worth of weather reports, and ended up with truly memorable book (and two more). Davis Schneiderman wrote Abecedarium by teaming up with another author, trading off the writing and editing of the story every hour. And then there’s the Oulipo movement, which places severe, often mathematical constraints on works so that writers have to “construct the labyrinth from which they propose to escape.” The point of all these examples is not that a writer should be bizarre for the sake of bizarreness; it’s that, if we actually open ourselves to seeing the infinite creative options available to us, the thought that someone could be out of ideas starts to seem impossible.

There are always more ideas. Sometimes, a writer simply has to turn to a new place and trust the process of creative experimentation. Take another phrase borrowed from the Oulipo: when the familiar ways get stale, writers should turn to “the continuation of literature through other means.”

Rain Taxi’s best pieces on experimental fiction and poetry from 2008:

“American Trilogist: An Interview with Kenneth Goldsmith” by Kareem Estefan (Fall 2008, Online), in which Goldsmith discusses his experimental trilogy of books titled The Weather, Traffic, and Sports.

Review by Geoffrey Cruickshank-Hagenbuckle of Writings for the Oulipo by Ian Monk (Summer 2008, Online), a collection of memorable examples from the Oulipo Movement.

“Lather, Rinse, Repeat: An Interview with Davis Schneiderman” by Brian Whitener (Winter 2007/2008, Online), in which Schneiderman discusses how experimental literature interacts with the publishing industry.

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Few things occupy our political imaginations like the concept of assassination. It exploits our deepest paranoia surrounding stability, nation, and our way of life as we know it: what would happen if our president, or pope, or any other figure we look to for leadership were swiftly and dramatically killed? Or, in the face of oppression or evil, what if the most revolutionary among us “removed” the person doing the oppressing? It’s such an affecting idea that we needed a different word than “kill” to discuss it; to assassinate, or be assassinated, is by definition significant. To think about it is dangerous, and to talk about it too loudly is a crime. Planned in secret, we’re left to fill in what we don’t know with conspiracy theories that range from plausible to depraved. It connotes more importance than “important.”

Naturally, such an inflammatory and fearful idea works its way into our literature, especially during times when a nation or group is feeling particularly vulnerable. Some of our most memorable television shows, movies, and books surround the idea of preventing or carrying out an assassination, and by extension preserving or changing history forever. Stop Hitler. Save the president. Preserve our politics, shatter theirs. Most recently, Marlon James’s Man Booker-winning novel A Brief History of Seven Killings revolves around a plot to assassinate Bob Marley in Jamaica during the 1970s.

2004, in America’s post-9/11 state of fear and nationalism as the Iraq War took form, was exactly such a time of heightened political paranoia. And it’s no accident that our literary minds went where they so often do under these circumstances. Maybe we go here because the thought of being able to carry out an assassination is empowering, or that being able to stop one makes us feel safe. Maybe it’s just that, when we’re scared, we tend to believe someone somewhere is scheming something. Whatever it is, the assassination theories and discussions won’t be going away, though. By definition, they’re too important.

Rain Taxi’s best reviews dealing with assassinations:

Review by Bradley E. Ayers of American Assassination by Four Arrows and Jim Fetzer (Winter 2004/2005, Online), which delves into the highly suspicious crash of Senator Paul Wellstone’s plane.

Review by Andrew Palmer of Checkpoint by Nicholson Baker (Fall 2004, Online), a highly controversial novel about two men plotting to assassinate George W. Bush.

Review by Rod Smith of Lost Splendor: The Amazing Memoirs of the Man Who Killed Rasputin by Prince Felix Youssoupoff (Spring 2004, Online), in which Smith asserts that every one of us is a “born assassin.”

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What’s a prose poem? It’s a question we were asking fifteen years ago and still wonder about today, even though we all agree the form has been around long enough for some of our favorite writers to master it. Of all literary forms, the prose poem might be the most slippery to define. In fact, many of us think about it in terms of what it isn’t: the prose poem is too lacking in poetic structure to be a conventional poem, and yet too attentive to its own rhythm and sound to be treated as pure prose. This classification has certainly generated some animated discussion from the literary world, from critics and scholars to the writers themselves, including a legendary 2001 piece by a particularly opinionated reviewer, an author whom we revere and celebrate for . . . well, not prose poems.

But most lovers of the form have realized that the problem with defining it isn’t a problem at all, but its best feature. The prose poem is elastic, and the gap it occupies between two established genres has become a space for some of the most memorable experimentation in contemporary literature. It can be the form for writers with great ideas that don’t fit formal convention, or the tool we use to stretch the borders of genre. It can be whatever it wants. And so the conversation over the nature of the prose poem carries on, and thankfully, so will the pieces themselves. With any luck, the “form” will continue to be as hard to describe as it was around the turn of the century. Perhaps the best we’ll ever do in tacking it down is with the same phrase the United States Supreme Court famously used to define pornography: “I know it when I see it.”

Rain Taxi’s best pieces on the prose poem from 2001:

“The Indexical Book Review” by David Foster Wallace
Spring 2001, Print

In reviewing The Best of the Prose Poem, Wallace gives us highly memorable commentary on the prose poem by creating a transgeneric form of his own.

“Language as Felt: An Interview with Alice Fulton”
Summer 2001, Print

MacArthur Fellowship-winning poet Alice Fulton discusses turning “plainstyle” into poetry.

“On the Street Where You Live: An Interview with James Tate”
Fall 2001, Print

The inimitable James Tate talks about narrative, poetry, and ending up somewhere in between.

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