“Sincerely”: On Why I Started Writing Poetic Emails and The Affective Vastness of Form

Incommensurate Labour Meets “Sent from my Iphone”

It is a running gag among students that emails sometimes take hours to write. Especially in emails to professors, we are often guilty of overanalyzing each sentence until they don’t make sense at all. Yet part of the labour of email writing is also making it look effortless. Even if it took you 30 minutes to come up with the perfect 3 sentences, the “incommensurate work” of endless drafts must not be apparent in the final version (Muñoz).

What’s more, the carefully curated content will probably be consumed in a few seconds. The second part of the running gag is that the person reading the email will return a one word reply—followed by a “Sent from my iphone”. Haunted by anxieties around the word, I instead reached for the possibilities that such a restrictive form could allow. And departing from oppressive professionalisms, I returned to feeling.

What form? The incommensurate labour of email writing must not be apparent in the final version, which will be consumed in just a few seconds.

The Anxious Poetics of Email Writing

I believe that the anxieties around email writing stem from the restrictive professionalism that it requires. Professionalism can be oppressive: it aims to eliminate qualities that are often associated with women and people of colour who get conflated with and “guilty of” affect. To be “professional” can often mean to act like a white man. The oppressive professionalism of email writing asks for a containment of feelings and anything deemed as “excess” by dominant discourses.

Written for brevity and ease of comprehension, the email demands the elimination of what it considers to be unnecessary—which are often the very things that characterize the poetics of more intimate communications. Deleting and editing out what is dear to us, we write to fit into the demands of the professional email form. Could we instead make the form fit what we actually want to say? In bringing back the feeling, there lies the possibilities of expanding restrictions.

What genre is suited to the rhythms of our everyday right now, and what departures from form can help us imagine our lives otherwise?

Form or Freedoms Forged From Restrictions

Literature students know the uncontainable possibilities that restrictive forms allow. Paradoxically, what allows for the freedom of imagination is often the strict rules of genre and form. There’s of course also freedom in breaking away from conventions. In poetry, moments where a poem breaks away from the meter it has previously established is where so much feeling overflows. The meter constructs the poem and vice versa, but what really makes the poem is its departions from the meter. This is how it constructs meaning through contrast.

Or so they had thought. Free verse poetry dismantled the meter. Suddenly there was so much freedom. But what Literature students also know is that what once dismantles the form, in time becomes the norm. Imagists, when they dismantled the rules of traditional poetry, revolutionized poetic language. Yet the revolutionary powers of free verse that challenged the reign of classical poetry have now become the norm. 

Through such wisdoms of Literary Studies, we reach the question: what genre is suited to the rhythms of our everyday right now, and what departures from form can help us imagine our lives otherwise?

Precarious Writing: A Writing Otherwise

From these emerge what I would like to call precarious writing. The idea comes from Anna Tsing’s amazing book The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins read for a class, where Tsing talks about the precarity of post-apocalyptic capitalism, something that we might have to adapt to, allowing possibilities of collaboration and different ways of living in our necessity to adapt to new conditions of life—tracked through the matsutake mushroom that lives in precarious conditions. 

Precarious writing is writing when there seems to be no time or possibility. It is a writing otherwise: in between stops on the metro, on the google docs app in your bed at 2 am, on the margins of your notebook during a lecture. There is no perfect moment. We forge moments of writing out of the little spaces of everyday existence.

The precarity of writing in unlikely moments opens up possibilities, allowing one to overcome perfection and the inability to start writing.

And in the rigidity of word counts and demands for brevity, the precarity of having so little space opens up possibilities for bending words to make them mean otherwise, through metaphor, symbols, and feelings—signifying doubly and forging meanings not foreclosed by meaning.

There’s a materiality to hand-written words and yet a spectrality to the touches offered through them. How can this touch be preserved in the email?

Email: A Form Haunted by Another

The precursor of the professional email, its unlikely cousin, is the poetic letter. Epistolary communications thrived in 18th and 19th century. Recently, I started writing letters to my friends I see everyday.

I suggest you try this too. Oce you sit down to write to your friend with a cup of tea and a lighted candle, you will be transported into a space (the 19th century?) where you will write words that you never thought were in you.

There’s a certain materiality to hand-written words and yet a spectrality to the touches offered through them—both which get lost in the digital email. This is also what Friedrich Kittler argued in Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. The direct link between the hand and the act of communication in the letter preserves a continuity that the mechanization of writing in the phone and computer severes. The editing erasures of oppressive professionalism are yet a further severing of the self. The letter, on the other hand, served as a “sensory surrogate” that allowed the reader to feel its writer. How can this touch be preserved in the digital form of the email?

Epistolary communications have held a special place in lesbian history. In some cases, such coded letters were the only surviving testament to past lesbian lives. And in some cases, lovers had to burn their letters before death lest they be used against them. Ephemera, as José Muñoz argues, is a survival strategy because it evaporates for those who could attack the ones creating it. Ephemeral communications constituted ghostly existences, yet these pieces that were never meant to survive, in fact testify to past lesbian existences today. When meaning evaporates, it will be the ephemeras of feeling that will stay, expanding form and life boundlessly. 

And that is why, dear reader, I started writing poetic emails. Because I don’t believe in the containment of feelings, in editing myself out, in the oppressive erasures of professionalism. Anticipating some critiques, I notice the emotional labour that might go into poetic email writing. Yet for me, the work of writing with my feelings comes easier than the restrictive work of editing them out. Affect is generative. As I’ve argued, I think the hesitation and anxiety of email writing stem from the demand to contain the feeling. And after all, the goal of the critiques of emotional labour is not that no one should be doing affective work, but that its uneven distribution be reconfigured.

Instead of complying with the rigid meter of email writing and the economy of emotions based on containment, I force my own wrenched accent, communicating meanings and feelings not foreclosed by the demands and erasures of the professional email. Turns out, the genre of the email is actually quite suited to the forms of affect I want to send.

After all, against the demands of form and professionalism, thriving in the anachronistic pleasures of epistolary communication in the 21st century can be a somewhat revolutionary act. 

Yours with love,

Zeynep

Works mentioned:

Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins.

Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, film, typewriter.

José Esteban Muñoz, Ephemera as Evidence.