A Letter from the Founder

Dear Reader,

In 2019, I applied to graduate programs in English literature.

My senior year of college, I hid myself in a nook in Columbia University’s Butler Library and hammered out a personal statement about my disillusionment with the politicization of literature. I intended to use my PhD, I wrote, to change the way we approached the humanities in the 21st century and to restore literature to its rightful place among the humanistic tradition. I was so eager to pursue this ambition that I rushed to show the only professor I trusted at Columbia what I had cooked up; I distinctly remember the wistful look on her face when, gently, she informed me that no one who had seriously devoted their life to the study of literature would be interested in reading such an attack on their scholarship. 

I hung my head. Over the next several years, I attempted to come to terms with literature’s current status in our society: the study of literature was an inherently leftist project, and no one worth their salt in the literary world would even entertain the notion that the primary purpose of literature was not to create societal change. 

But that was not why I fell in love with literature. I loved literature for the music of poetry that rivaled the notes of Beethoven and Chopin; the word patterns that fell together like an intricate cipher; the at-times quotidian, at-times profound revelations about the nature of man; and the stories—sometimes on another planet, sometimes across my own Manhattan street—that gave us a window in the human psyche. And somewhere in the back of my mind was lodged the fundamental truth that literary merit did not rest on its relation to the queer/post-colonialist/anti-racist/etc. machine. 

When I first started Pens and Poison six months ago, I was careful not to let my grievances slip on the Internet. Yet one lazy afternoon, I decided to repurpose my graduate school personal statement as a personal essay on my humble corner of the Internet—the Pens and Poison Substack. No one reads my Substack anyway, I thought. No one would get angry. 

Two weeks later, I have been both humbled and elated by the overwhelmingly positive response to my piece “Leave Literature Alone” and have decided to go public with our mission. My inbox has been flooded with emails from jaded professors, amateur writers, and longtime literary lovers who share my views on literature and are fed up with this equation of literature with far-left political ideologies.

I once thought that I was alone in loving literature in this peculiar way, but I know now that there are so many reasonable voices who are equally as disheartened by literature’s annexation by the far left—and that we can do our part to encourage modern readers to consider literature in a different way and restore to its onetime classically liberal traditional. I am so grateful for your early support as we embark together on this journey. We have a lot of work to do, but I am proud to say that at Pens and Poison, we have already begun restoring literature to its rightful place. 

Lots of love, 

Liza Libes
Founder - Pens and Poison