Silver Door's One(ish) Year Anniversary
& Substack's inevitable evolution away from text
Amazingly, for me at least, Silver Door has been plodding along for over a year now.
I published my first and by far longest piece, Human Conversion in The Digital Age, on March 2, 2023. Since then the great
has joined as co-editor, and altogether we’ve published 62 poems and 62 prose pieces, spanning topics from poetry, digital technology, to Orthodox spirituality, and then some. In a fit of sweet irrationality, I even penned a manifesto:
A savvier version of myself would have spent the weeks leading up to SD's one year anniversary sprinkling bread crumbs of anticipation throughout my posts and across my social media accounts, perhaps leading up to some cool giveaway, or at least an exciting announcement. But honestly, I completely forgot.
It was only after Substack’s recent announcement introducing Substack Creator Studio, a way to lure in video stars from other platforms such as TikTok , that I began thinking back to my manifesto and the origin of this publication.
Needless to say, many Substackers were not happy with this turn of events:
As I argue in Human Conversion in The Digital Age, the ubiquity of digital technology is quickly erasing what remains of the old print-based order that had already been significantly weakened by pre-digital electric technology:
“During his life, it was said that John Milton’s Paradise Lost was on the bedside table of every landlady and shopkeeper in England. This is likely an exaggeration, but it makes a point…Now imagine trying to convince some Joe off the street from the 1960s to read Paradise Lost for two hours instead of watching 2001: A Space Odyssey. It’s preposterous.)”
Substack is an ambitious platform, and as such it cannot remain solely a place for writers and readers, as cozy as that may sound.
Addressing my fellow poets, I write in the The Substack Poetry Manifesto that:
Poets need to embrace a little I AM BATMAN-energy if this is going to work. You’re not just a writer. Challenge yourself to do more across different domains and you’ll be surprised how you can rise to the occasion.
…
First, to talk about poetry is to talk about poems. Today we often associate poems with books, which is entirely reasonable, but poems throughout history have been transmitted primarily through the spoken word.
The unit of measurement for poetry is the poem, not the book.
Substack gives you all the tools you need to provide an audience with poems in written and oral form. If enough people are delighted by your poems, you can simply put them all into a book and sell it to them. Right? Right.
In the coming months I’ll be updating the suggested protocols at the end of the Manifesto, after I’ve had time to play around with some of Substack’s new features.
This will sound Bond-villain-level pretentious, but if I’m being completely honest, I've never really considered myself a writer; I've always thought of myself as a poet, first and foremost. Poetry and the written word have deep ties but it is primarily an oral language.
The poet speaks.
Let us not forget.
My poem, Your Mother was a Flower: