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∙ 190 ∙ tell it like it is the experimental traditionalists ■ General terms, like mastiffs, need restraint. Their tether is definition, which is always limiting and involves a principle of value, hence of prejudice and personal idiosyncrasy—one thing is preferred to another. Once the limits are set, distinctions and divisions follow as neatly as theorems in a formal system. Experimental is a word sorely in need of leashing. Applied to writing, an endeavor markedly unlike chemistry or physics, the word becomes literary , the concept shadowy; like many literary terms it may even need to be muzzled or put to sleep. Experimental writing is often regarded as a kind of writing, a genre like science fiction or pornography.Yet a piece of writing is experimental only by degrees. Nothing is unqualifiedly experimental even though much bad writing passes for good by donning this disguise—thus entrenching the forward posturing of the advance guard. A work is experimental only insofar as it is a controlled deviation from a form mastered and a tradition understood. Apprenticeship, that slow learning, precedes experimentation, though all too often this irreversible order is reversed and the mystery of experiment precludes the mastery of craft—a license permitted writers but not stonemasons or carpenters.What small good is unearthed from the rubble is the result of chance, not of understanding. Formal work establishes expectations: that these things will happen in these vague, general ways. If the anticipated events fall out in the manner prescribed, we have genre. Yet the pieces of writing that remain most remarkable, most memorable, are those which successfully, subtly, defeat the expectations aroused by their chosen forms. The conceptual scheme is tell it like it is ∙ 191 nudged and an old familiar variable receives a new range, a new interpretation , and a new value. The writers presented here demonstrate a few of the ways in which this nudge can be achieved. There are detectable influences in all writers. But the distinction to be borne in mind is between derivation and deviation. In a trivial sense every writer is derivative because he is influenced by whatever he reads and likes. To be derivative is to declare that a craft is being learned; to deviate from a form is to state that the craft is mastered, the form understood, and the traditions explored.All of these writers are well beyond the years of apprenticeship ; all are journeymen; a few are obviously masters of their chosen work; and the pieces collected here fulfill certain criteria of excellence. Gus Blaisdell (Coeditor) 1967 editorial from New Mexico Quarterly (Summer 1967), Fiction issue. ...

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