IT IS NOT uncommon for an editorial of this type to pass a forceful comment on the state of the world and to remark on the rightful place of its subject – in this case art and thought – within that broader domain. Perhaps an elegantly worded, articulately phrased argument premising our content’s various merits and the nature of their vitality to the world around us would not be amiss. Maybe the work we publish is not quite as vital as we had hoped. Maybe, for want of finer work, we find ourselves settling for banality prefaced once again by a declaration of our missive. Gladly we don’t think this to be the case.

It is becoming increasingly clear to us that art needs work. Before being set free into a world so full of living and dying, wanting and needing, it (the art) could do with some self-analysis, a cooling off period. Perhaps it needs a period of quarantine before it can be allowed to fend for itself. Perhaps it needs to be starved of air till, bursting for breathe, and burning white, it calmly awaits further, disastrous ignition.

Our interest here is not in the quarantine of a work of art, nor in criticism or the post-mortem of a story. Our interest lies in what goes into the gestation of a piece of work; the consideration given to it before pen is put to paper; before ink is put on the page, and then, the thought given to each stroke of the pen; the neighbourhood in which each of those thoughts were raised before they set race through the labouring mind of a writer.

The editors of this journal have heard it mooted that words are too common a currency to trade in art – the sense of art conveyed in such a declaration is one of grand intention and of noble achievement. While paint might be the mode of communication for a choice and talented few, everyone uses words to communicate their simplest of thoughts and to phrase even their basest of utterances; those of us lucky enough to be literate write letters, notes, e-mails; we keep diaries, and, sometimes, compose our words for wider circulation or public consumption.

In the twelfth issue of McSweeney’s (Quarterly Concern) its editor, Dave Eggers, introduced a selection of ‘20-Minute Stories’ of which he remarked – in his typical way of shirking all sense of undue, out-of-place or pretentious seriousness – might constitute a new form; might shine light on the creative process; might explain the nature of art: why and how it is sometimes great. His magazine was inundated with submissions of these single-sitting compositions; his suggestion of the form clearly resonating with writers (and readers) bored with the verbosity of much modern fiction.

Eggers now contributes a short-short story to The Guardian’s Weekend magazine where, six (or so) months on, he further explained that these were stories about moments that ‘wouldn’t or couldn’t’ find their way into his novels and, ‘which didn’t warrant a longer story.’

Literary jargon is illiterate with terms for those different literary forms that are used for differing purpose: the fable, the folk-tale, the exemplum, the parable. Now the twenty-minute story is added to the anecdote and the episode, and the short-short story, which Abrams calls ‘the slightly elaborated anecdote,’ and which takes us almost full circle. To close the circle we will need to plot on its circumference: the novel, the novella or novelette, and the short-story itself which Edgar Allan Poe (again courtesy of Abrams) called the prose tale and defined as a narrative which can be read in one sitting, and which concerns itself with a ‘certain unique or single effect.’

Maybe it spoils the fun to suggest that economy of expression should not be confused with economy of time. Call us pedants, but are we not confusing scribbling for writing, a doodle with a finished piece or, fundamentally, literacy with literary?

In thinking about art as analogous to speed-chess we are reminded of a classic exchange in the libel courts:

Far be it from us to suggest that anyone is coxcombical or, even, to label them impudent. Novels can turn out verbose for many reasons – bad editing and the market’s demand for value amongst them – but the temptation to win the fight against verbosity can lead to our viewing the creation of art through narrow and limited parameters.

There are many ways of putting ink on a page. While forcing a piece of work into clothes that are too big (or too small) for it might serve as a valuable exercise in the craft of writing, the publication of such work is often enough to embarrass the ink for filling the page; while it might teach the writer to utilise an economy of expression, it also suggests to him that his work can be ‘knocked off.’

Ultimately any approach that favours time over intent will crowd the already crowded middle ground of easily digestible, under-worked writing; fiction tacitly designed for a lazy, satisfied and compromising readership who fear what might be amongst them if a lifetime’s knowledge was ever unleashed.

The editors of this journal are in the habit of receiving, and humbly considering their judgements on, work described by its authors as poetry, or short-fiction, or, sometimes, prose-poems – the most elusive and mysterious of all short-literary forms.

Whereas the writer of a short-story might list amongst his work’s principal concerns: character, voice, plot, and imagery; the prose-poem haughtily rejects these elements in favour of: rhythm, figurative speech, assonance, rhyme, and a fresh attendance to language and style – all this, in its author’s eyes, marks it as superior, or maybe just different, to that ‘unique or single effect’ when it is artfully arranged into an alluring pattern of plot.

Maybe, as Maxim Barrault wrote in our first issue, the writer of prose is engaging with rationality. If this is so then it follows that the writer who calls his work a prose-poem seeks to engage his readers on a level that might otherwise be restricted to him if he inserted line-breaks. Maybe the author who labels his work a prose-poem would agree with Mr Egger’s when he says that some moments, incidents, anecdotes, or experiences don’t ‘warrant’ inclusion in a work of any greater magnitude.

So the potential contributor calls his work a poem because it’s not a short-story, nor does it concern character so it isn’t a story of character, nor a tale which might be the simple story of a single incident; he calls it a prose-poem because he doesn’t have the time, or the focus, or the artistry, to develop it into something greater; and he has to churn it out of his note-book because distraction beacons, and who has the time to review unused snippets, observations, sketches, beginnings?

James Huneker titled his chapter on the Preludes in, Chopin: The Man and His Music: ‘Moods in Miniature.’ There is no doubt that the majority of the 24 preludes in Chopin’s Opus 28 are short in length. These brief pieces, these small frames, expanded by the composer from improvised sketches, composed in order through each of the musical keys, have been variously described as containing, a universe of feeling and mood; as being, outbreaks of the wildest anguish and heart-rending pathos; and as, small falling stars dissolving into tones as they fall – which is all very well and rather romantic. But we are more interested in those descriptions of them as: free creations on a small basis, embryonic, intimate, cameos, sketches, the beginning of studies, or ruins. Huneker himself, whose pen is often too impressionistic for our tastes, wrote:

It is clear that these preludes are creations of great magnitude which, even when played by the most cautious of hands, will rarely average over a minute in length. Thus it is wrong to suggest that magnitude, despite its commonly accepted meaning, should, when applied to an artistic form, refer to its length, or its size, or the time it takes to compose or to read.

We must learn to forget our material concerns – as the court in Whistler’s libel suit did – and luxuriate instead in how the artist, when he’s labouring at every aspect of his capability, manages to instill a lifetime’s knowledge into each and every word or phrase.

The Shorter Oxford defines a prelude as a preliminary performance, action or condition, preceding and introducing one that is more important; it need not be so. If we were to coin a term for a new literary form (ignoring, perhaps, Wordsworth or Mansfield) we would suggest that a prelude is a piece of writing which concerns itself primarily with mood, and the transition from one mood to another.

The second-rate writer might attempt an exegesis of mood through those loose impressionistic means that we most associate with bad criticism rather than impressionistic fiction. But when Nizaket Ali (as he did in his story Kingscross in our initial number) writes, “Powdering her image she reflected slyly...” or when Amanda Harter (in this issue) writes, “Sticking slowly, leg-by-leg, the old man strode the semi-circle.” we are aware of these writers attempting to mould their moments into something else, to chisel at reality and experience in such a way as it might become literature; we are aware of an application of effort which strives for an economy of expression but cannot be hammered out in twenty minutes or read once, then discarded. Something in it calls at us to read it again and again.

In the hands of a writer attending fully to his art, the simplest of words cease to be simple; that which might otherwise be considered inarticulate reaches new, unimagined levels of meaning and resonance. When T.S. Eliot, in his Preludes, writes:

we cannot criticise his verse for failing to find a better word than thing.

Instead we are amazed by how the currency of words, when traded carefully, with thought, with work, with learning, and with art; when considered, and reconsidered; when neither rushed nor doodled – can affect us in ways that we should never have imagined were possible.

We hope you enjoy this issue of The Quarterly Ephemera.