Why modernism? And why now?

For everything that literary modernism meant, means, and might mean, Sara and I were primarily interested in exploring how critical-adjacent essayistic writing might take shape within ballast’s contemporary online venue and context. Yes, when settling on our name for this venture three (!) years ago, it wasn’t lost on either of us that ballast shared a certain lineage with the little magazines circulating in the modernist era–Wyndham Lewis and the Vorticist’s BLAST perhaps the most readymade nomenclature to ballast itself. While we disavow the nationalist, militant, and mercenary impulses of that publication, I for one can get behind BLAST’s manifesto to deem things to be “cursed,” “blessed,” and “blasted” in the aesthetic sense insofar as critical labels can and should transcend easy objective categorization and classist sensibilities among the low-, middle-, and high-brow.

In that spirit, we’re excited to taxi our first “REMARKS” special feature onto ballast 3.4’s runway. Our two essays, Daniel Barbiero’s deep dive into André Breton’s “exilic” period(s) and Robert Savino Oventile’s expansive inquiry into the thresholds at work in Hart Crane’s White Buildings, serve as phenomenal entries for this new foray for us, and I thank them for their trust in us and for their willingness to participate and in this editorial subventure.

I’ll let the essays speak for themselves, but I will take a brief moment to highlight the need for such long views in our present times. A small grace in our uncertain and weary moment, but I was happy for the chance to revisit Hart Crane’s “Chaplinesque” with Oventile jogging my memory; I’ll sign off with that poem’s two opening stanzas.

We make our meek adjustments,
Contented with such random consolations
As the wind deposits
In slithered and too ample pockets.

For we can still love the world, who find
A famished kitten on the step, and know
Recesses for it from the fury of the street,
Or warm torn elbow coverts.

(Hart Crane, “Chaplinesque” lines 1-8)

Take care of yourselves and one another. And thanks for reading.

–Jacob Schepers, for ballast