Djelloul Marbrook

I’m crazy about a lot of things, even a few people. My most precious craziness is reserved for reference books, even the most arcane. One of my favorites is The Oxford Book of Letters. I happened to glance at it recently. I soon found myself wondering how the demise of the posted letter in favor of e-mail will affect us.

Will we still collect the letters of great men and women, the letters that have shed so much light on their thinking and their private lives? How will we collect them, knowing e-mail files are often lost when hard drives give up the ghost and haven’t been copied?

And if we fashion ways to preserve and publish e-mail, will they inevitably represent a degradation of language and even thought? Will their content be as broken as a text message, as cryptic? Will they be coded in ways that make them less accessible?

I think it’s all too easy and inviting, especially for someone like me who has lived through the eras of radio and television, to lament the passing of a splendid literary form, the kind so well represented in the Oxford letters. But because I’m a poet and have studied the change of poetic form, particularly in the 20th Century, I’m going to reserve judgment.

I see no reason why the epistolary novel should not give way to the e-mail novel. In fact, I see some decided advantages in terms of moving plot and developing characters. After all, the well considered postal message was always crafted to conceal as much as it revealed. E-mail is much more revealing, and the more dangerous for it, which is good for literature, since all good literature is dangerous and subversive.

I think e-mail and text massaging may well become elegant literary forms. In their spontaneity and immediacy they may well reveal more than the considered letters found in the Oxford. Certain poets whom we now regard as important were once seen as barbarians. Arthur Rimbaud comes to mind. Then there were Hart Crane’s hopelessly impenetrable lines. The complaints about those lines have now generally given way to admiration, even from those who still can’t decipher him.

As I wrote poems I was often writing headlines, so I’m accustomed to compression and its uses. I think the compression inherent in text massaging and e-mail will offer up a kind of poetic form, and I don’t see any reason why e-mail should be any more barbaric than the post letter. It depends on who is writing it, just as style and merit depended on the writer back in the heyday of the letter sealed with wax and delivered by hand. There were poor writers then as now.

I think e-mail is in the same stage as the Internet itself, an early stage given to exploration and the development of models and protocols. So I see no reason to despair, and I don’t glance either nostalgically or morosely at my beloved Oxford Book of Letters.

—DM

Photo by calligrapher Kathleen McCann Scribner of escort cards she made for a wedding at Central Park Boathouse, New York City