Dear Reader:

When I was nine years old and living in Berlin I had a very unpleasant art teacher whom I disliked immensely. Her great offense, in my eyes, was this: every day she brought a different photograph into the classroom. Our assignment, for the entirety of the hourlong class, was to copy the picture with as much painstaking precision as possible.

I imagine there is hardly a nine-year-old in the world who would submit to this exercise with equanimity. One day, when I was supposed to be reproducing a picture of a bicycle on a dim city street, I committed the grave sin of putting to use a particularly fine new pink coloured pencil, adding a sunset to a sky that, in the original, was grey with clouds. The school punished dissidents with a kind of nineteenth-century severity; I was sent from the room and left to imagine myself poor Jane Eyre forced by the tyranny of Mr Brocklehurst to spend the day in exile alone on a chair.

It’s funny how certain incidents from childhood continue to rankle years afterwards: I can still conjure the indignation I felt at that punishment. I tell you this not simply in the interests of squaring a childhood grudge. I think that my old art teacher was articulating an attitude which is all too common in our present moment and which, if everybody in the world were content to believe it, would be catastrophic for our creative capacity as a culture. The truth is that when we make art of any kind, we do more than reflect. We create an intelligible world in order to understand something important about the real one.

In fact I was not unusual; all children know this. The pictures they draw have the absolute simplicity of a medieval morality play, meaning tacked neatly on to the end. A smiling sun —happiness—no matter that the sun doesn’t really smile when our stick-figure family assembles holding hands. The child does not desire simply to hold a mirror up to her world; such a design would be absolutely foreign to her instincts and would scarcely appeal to her. She understands that her project is rather an interpretative one, that her aim is to reveal some facet of experience—a truth, a depth—that is more important than the mere perfection of a surface-image. She wants to create a cleaner, more compelling, more interpretable world than the frightening and muddled one she finds herself in. She draws because she wants to understand.

It might seem an obvious argument that the poem or the story, like the child’s drawing, is almost by its nature an interpretive act; the very choosing of a detail to include or exclude points to the active construction of meaning by the writer. None but the most devoted postmodernist could imagine a piece of art absolutely and impersonally reflective, devoid of imposed narrative or signification. And yet what the child knows without trying is, in fact, an essential truth about art that we grown-ups are continually at risk of forgetting.

**

This summer an insightful New York Times opinion piece by Catherine Shannon argued that our modern world trains us to consider our own reflections. We are taught, Shannon claims, to spend an age before the mirror in the mornings, to glance always at our passing image in shop-windows, to examine and re-examine the photographs of ourselves on social media. Never before have mirrors, once the luxuries of the wealthy, been as commonplace in our homes, never before have cameras been as universally and cheaply available. At no previous historical moment has the image of our physical selves been as immediately and widely accessible, or as endlessly reproducible, as it is today.

Our bodies, then, or rather the surface-images of our bodies, have become one of the central concerns of our age. Our imagined maladies and the cures we seek for them are almost all bodily but not embodied. The present cultural fascination with “self-care” often in fact demands care merely of the surface of the body: anyone who has spent time on the younger side of social media has come across the endless beauty rituals we women, especially, are told to consider caring for the self. Maybe I’m revealing more about my own algorithm than the culture at large, but I’ve always been struck by the fact that among the myriad tooth-whitening products the girls on my Instagram feed smilingly apply—“High-maintenance self-care during the weekend so I can be low-maintenance during the week!”—I have come across not a single advertisement for toothpaste. The pain of a cavity is perhaps irrelevant if your teeth can be made white again by Monday morning. In Marxist terms, then, the body has become the ultimate surface for projection, another object in the scheme of commodity fetishization.

It’s notable, perhaps, that the fantasy of a mirror that reflects not merely the surface of the self but a depth beneath it is an old one. What else did Narcissus seek in the reflecting pool, why else did the magic mirror of Snow White’s evil stepmother, telling as it did only the truth, so captivate us as children? Mirror mirror on the wall, we used to ask, who’s the fairest of them all? Today we still ask, still hope to hear the longed-for answer—you—and to believe it.

**

For a culture so fascinated with bodies we are oddly unwilling to live from within them. We shy away from the everyday minutiae of embodied physical experience: take, for instance, my generation’s oft-reported-on discomfort with sex and alcohol—our fixation with optimizing our food intake, with consuming just the right about of protein or fibre, delivered in a handy pre-packaged bar or a quinoa bowl promising to deliver each necessary macronutrient in ideal quantities—our perverse fascination with maximising physical attractiveness, with botox and filler and skincare and workout classes and on occasion, though perhaps mostly in the imaginations of disillusioned middle-aged readers of the New York Times, even the more extreme ‘looksmaxxing’ rituals of bizarre devotees of Clavicular and the far-right.

This obsession with exercising, dieting, restricting, and controlling our physical selves all too often renders simple physical pleasure in ordinary experience impossible. As I argued in my last editor’s note, the question of what it’s actually like to be a person inside a body moving through the world is a central one in this machine age, in which AI algorithms are able endlessly to re-juggle what other people have said about being human into believable, though hollow, imitations of physical experience.

I urge us not to become hollow in this way ourselves. I asked Claude yesterday if it was like anything to be him. His carefully programmed answer—“Honestly, I don't know—and I want to be careful not to overclaim or underclaim here”—told me little about the nature of his consciousness and even less about the threat he posed to my own. But of this I am sure: it absolutely is like something to be me. And more than that, it’s like something particular to be me. Not just to be a young white woman, not just to have red hair; not just to appear on the surface, as I do, to be a conventional heterosexual college-educated upper-middle-class American who spends time on the side of social media for whom Repetto ballet flats and a Chloé Paddington on the arm, although I can afford neither, are de rigueur. To reduce my own self to such general characteristics might enliven me to certain privileges I am afforded as a result of them, but it also deadens me to the particular human experiences of my own life and renders me incapable of expressing them or sharing them with others.

We equate our surfaces with our selves. As Myles Early puts it in “Spaniel Daisy Retriever Yarrow,” which you’ll encounter in this issue, we struggle to be a “person on the ground,” hovering instead perpetually “six feet above” our bodies. We manipulate them as marionettes, believing that it is our real selves we hold in our hands. We are endlessly looking at our bodies, looking in the mirror. In doing so, we lose sight of a self that no mirror, not even the wicked Queen’s enchanted glass, can reveal; because it lives not on the surfaces of our bodies but within them.

**

To return, then, to art. Though every generation seems troubled by anxieties that it believes to be particular to itself but which in truth seldom are, I can’t help but believe Shannon’s argument that ours is a time of unprecedented fascination with the reflection in the mirror. The very language of reflection has seeped so absolutely into our literary discourse that we hardly notice it. “The poem reflects the author’s struggles with….” “The novel reflects the central issues of its time.” The issue of ‘relatability’ has similarly become an essential one. Can I ‘relate’ easily to the heroine of this novel? Can I ‘relate’ to the sentiment expressed by the speaker of this poem? It’s no secret that schools across the country have for years been removing great works of classical literature from elementary and high school reading lists. “It’s just not relatable for the kids,” is a refrain I often heard at my own high school in justification of a curriculum that increasingly resembled the ‘new releases’ table at a Barnes and Noble—a series of stories whose protagonists overwhelmingly resembled ourselves.

We look to our literature above all to reflect our own faces back at us. Do I see myself in this? has become a question that we are endlessly encouraged to ask of the art we create and consume. What we mean is not, does this capture something about my experience of the world around me? Rather, we want our literature to recreate, as exactly as possible, the surface-characteristics of our circumstances and our selves. We’ve come to look to our stories and our poems as we look in our mirrors—to affirm our own surfaces, to describe with ideal precision the image we reflect. And so it has come to be that the art we produce is not about the world at all, but about ourselves.

**

In VOLTA’s Fall 2026 issue we suggest an alternate approach to the production and consumption of literature. We are interested in contact, not between the artist and herself, but between the artist and the world. Bodies, or at least bodies-as-surfaces, are largely absent from the work we have selected. Who is the speaker in “The New Brutalism” or “Shadowboxing?” What do they look like? To which social categories do they belong? We neither know nor are asked to care; and yet through them the physical experience of being a mind inside a body is rendered vivid and compelling. Braun’s poem is concerned with the role of the body in a culture of production, but its power comes from its unwillingness to reduce a body to a working thing. His descriptions are complex, multisensory: “gullies gurgling with crud, distilling its fragrance / among the dim lamps of worn porches.” Material experience is crucial: this kind of radical embodiedness renders “The New Brutalism” a powerful rejection of the stultifying world of the “television [which] remained always on.”

We know nothing, either, about the bodies of the people in Julie Hanson’s “Marriage,” bittersweet, unpretending, and sincere. And yet we are able, on the basis of a brief encounter with something as mundane as a “nice red truck… parked diagonally across a lawn,” to imagine their characters and feel their emotions alongside them. Hanson is a devoted noticer of the physical world; she is admirably attuned to all the little details that make up a life, and teaches her readers to be so also. The irreverent question at the end of “Marriage” locates the poem absolutely in the realm of physical minutiae and everyday concerns; it’s almost Williams-like in its capacity to re-enchant us with ordinary life. So much depends, Hanson might have written.

Nina Reljić contrasts “replicas of feeling” with the vividness of real life, in which “the trees express a different green.” Marie Ungar in her ars poetica “Secret Poem” conceives of a poem as an expression, or even an extension, of embodied experience: the “red light” of a sunset “flickers here and here across the poem's blushing face.” David Keplinger’s “The Ordovician Period” renders the body strange, unfamiliar, and profoundly beautiful.

We have sought expressions of experience that are absolutely individual and unrelated to surfaces-images. In our eyes a writer should be only sincere and unselfconscious. She should inhabit her own body completely but particularly and personally, without reference to anybody else. There should be nobody else who is like her and nobody who is unlike her. She should have utter unbending faith in the things she sees and feels, she should be certain that they are all true and terribly important, she should walk in her garden and think, I am the first and only person to look at a rose in this way. It should not occur to her that there might be another person, similar to her, who has ever been moved by a rose; but if such a thing were told to her she should think it absolutely natural, and be glad. To her writing should be only like seeing, like the act of seeing, as immediate and profound as being. “I am the arm that is swinging and I am the swinging,” writes Miranda Argyros in “Shadowboxing.” The writer should in this way be a feeling body moving through the world.

I see this, I feel this, a poem should say. This is the feeling of wind, this is a shadow the color of dust, this is moonlight and the blackened outline of a leaf quivering on that branch. Elsewhere there are other things, too, but they do not concern me; this, before me, is a particular beauty. This is a singular truth.

And what am I? I am individual, I am momentary. I do not reflect; I am only a lens. I am the eye that looks upon them.

Maisie Bilston & Charlotte Ungar

Co-editors in Chief
15 September 2026