How Not To Look At It

[dr_pretentious]

It was a good day at the poetry festival, with lots of fine performances by old favorites of mine, and by people I'd never heard of. I got to catch up with most of my old poetry cronies from my last days in academia and the years when I ran the reading series at Cleo's Cafe.

I spent a while catching up with a very dear friend--someone whose poems I greatly admire, a person of discernment, an articulate critic, a riveting performer, etc. But my very dear friend is bitter that he hasn't yet managed to parlay his stunningly good poetry into a career as a poet.

Put aside for a moment your skepticism about poetry as a career. No, really, put that aside. There are people who do make a career of poetry, and a living at it too, so why should my friend not be one of them? It's not a stupid question on his part.

So there we were under the big tent, watching the famous poets on the main stage. After each one, while the applause roared, my friend leaned to me and made some observation about the last poet's shortcomings. What about that performance could only have been accomplished in poetry? If you'd been told that it was stand-up comedy, would you have been able to tell the difference? Was anything happening in that poem, if you strip out the identity politics? Does this guy have anything going for him aside from the baritone voice? He'd have served himself better if he'd boiled it all down to, What do they got that I ain't got?

After a poet from Bangladesh read her work in a translation someone else had made from the Bengali for her, my friend leaned over to say, I'm not sure that was a poem. Did you think that was a poem? Um, no, but it's probably a poem in the original Bengali. Oh. Maybe so.

What I keep trying to say to him is... Well, matociquala was more concise making the point about genre fiction than I ever was when making it about poetry. Books don't sell because of the things they don't do wrong; they sell because of the things they do right. It's not really helpful to the writer who hasn't broken in yet to point to the flaws in a successful writer's work and say, My writing doesn't suck in that particular way, so where's my fame? Where's my money?

The thing to do is go to school on anybody who knows something you don't, even if you're not sure yet what it is. Even if it's something you revile and would never choose to do. There's no success that can't be learned from. If the other guy's published and you aren't, he probably knows something worth knowing.

My brilliant but disgruntled friend has gone on his way, too dismayed to return on Sunday for the last day of the Festival. I don't know when we'll cross paths again. No doubt, when next I see him, he will still be convinced that the only reason publishers are willing to print Diane diPrima's poetry is that she slept with Kerouac back in the heyday of the Beats. The heyday of the Beats was some time ago, and I'm pretty sure nobody has ever bought a copy of Loba on the basis of some dead guy having thought the author was hot back in the 1950s. Any publisher who can curry favor with Jack Kerouac now by publishing his ex-girlfriend... Well, that's a cosmological problem for another day, like maybe Samhain. Questions about how diPrima has kept her networking up for half a century so that she's still able to get her work to market when most of her original cohort is dead, or questions about what human need her work speaks to such that she still has devoted readers, well, those are practical questions that might help with the problem at hand.

Comments

[rednikki.livejournal.com]

Is this someone a someone who is also an old friend of mine? (If so, next time you see him, tell him I said hello.)

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty sure you don't know the embittered friend I was hanging out with at the festival.

Do you mean this old friend over here (http://www.joshcorey.blogspot.com/)? If so, he's published two volumes of poetry with good presses, and he's a rising talent of note in the particular poetry circles he most esteems. I'm pretty sure he'll have tenure track prospects once his dissertation's defended. He has been willing to pay his dues (MFA, PhD, Stegner Fellowship) in exactly the ways my embittered festival companion wasn't willing to. Josh is a poet's poet--his aesthetic is so experimental, his audience will always be small, but that's what he's aiming for, so he wins.

Oh, and scroll down on his blog to see happy wedding and honeymoon pictures.

[jaime-sama.livejournal.com]

Huh! So I did learn something useful in grad school (if from other students, not from professors). I learned that there are loads of people out there who want to be faculty, who have PhDs, publications, and glowing teaching reviews, but can't land a tenure track job, because there aren't enough jobs. Not getting a job is no reflection at all on the quality of their work. Maybe a reflection on the quality of their advisors' networking abilities.

You could introduce him to some, and they could form a support group. (You and I aren't eligible, having declined to pursue the faculty jobs...)

There are probably even fewer poet "jobs" than tenure track faculty jobs. How many poets can we support? What percentage of people in the world ever buy even one book of poetry?

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

As Billy Collins (former poet laureate) observes, the trouble with poetry is that it encourages the writing of more poetry. How many poets can we support? I don't know, but apparently we can support hundreds, perhaps thousands of full-time teachers of poetry. Supporting poets who don't teach is another matter altogether. I can only think of one poet who makes a living at poetry--no teaching, no day job--and that's Li-Young Lee, who is very much worth reading. If anyone now living writes love poems as good as e.e. cummings's love poems, it's Li-Young Lee.

One of the weird things about America is the marginal position of poetry in our public life. In most other nations and cultures, poetry is something that the general public at least notices, and that some sizable portion of the general public even cares about to some extent. In Muslim cultures, poetry is a major part of public discourse--that's one of the things people point to when they want to talk about how alien They are to Us. In poor countries, poor people don't necessarily buy books of poetry, but memorizing substantial amounts of verse is normal. Coleman Barks, one of the two great translators of Rumi into contemporary English, talks about how he went to Afghanistan under the auspices of our State Department and gave talks about Rumi and world poetry. Huge numbers of ordinary Afghans showed up. When Barks wanted to illustrate a point with some bit of Rumi's verse, his entire audience would recite it with him. Could an audience of ordinary Americans do that with anything other than the usual Robert Frost chestnut?