Let’s not be poetry victims

Meter and rhyme isn’t much in fashion and hasn’t been for decades. But there are still people who don’t consider a poem a poem unless it presents in rhyme and meter. As a kid I felt — victimized is too strong a word — I felt pressure from people like that. I never experienced much pleasure reading rhyming verse growing up. Sure, there was the occasional poem or song lyric that got in my head in a good way. “Jack jumped over the candlestick …” I did force rhyme and meter under the gun of class assignments. It felt like math, all that counting counting counting. I didn’t always hate the result. But it did not read as fun. 

I was much more interested in fiction. You could do anything in fiction. Imagination could run wild. I wanted to get school credit for that! Naturally, including freedom in the school curriculum was frowned upon. But in high school an after school poetry class got offered, I guess as an experiment to see if students would show up. The teachers were poets; their main text was Kenneth Koch’s Wishes, Lies, and Dreams. And what it taught was freedom — poetry was a mind set loose. Even meaning could shake off its chains. I loved it. I wrote tons. Was any of it metered verse? 

Once I got hooked on writing poetry I read all over. Most of it was free verse, but one can’t help reading poetry in received forms at least sometimes. I’m a fan of Blake’s “Tyger, Tyger,” and have lines from it memorized. “Tyger, tyger, burning bright / In the forests of the night.” But metered verse can be painful — exhausted rhymes, contorted syntax, the mind-numbing barking at the fence.  

I’m not the only one who felt victimized by the way poetry was taught. “[I]n seventh grade, my English teacher in the public high school was a poet,” Annie Finch says, “and he saw that I was pretty serious about writing poetry and he said, ‘Real poets write free verse.’” Finch wanted to be a real poet, so she ditched rhyme and meter, except for that one versification course in college where the prof passed around Finch’s student poems as exemplary. That wasn’t enough to override the judgment of the seventh grade teacher, apparently, for Finch “hid all those [metered poems] in a drawer and continued to write free verse.”

I have to pause here. What is a “real poet”? 

So I’m reading along in this “conversation” with the well-published poet irritated at the way she cloaks herself in victimhood and how she is convinced that what poetry really needs is a renaissance of metered verse, how she is doing her part teaching classes and classes and classes — which everybody totally loves, every student agreeing with her that their desperate thirst is being slaked at last — when I hit the place where suddenly it comes to me that Annie Finch isn’t just a poetry conservative, Annie Finch is crazy. I mean, crazy in a way that cuts through the crap about her meeting the needs of the world. 

When she finally shook off the fettering notions of the seventh grade teacher, Finch took to scansion with a will. Making up for lost time, it seems, she became obsessed.

“I scanned all of Whitman, and I scanned all of Dickinson … I learned to start to hear things so much, for years it drove me crazy, because I would be scanning while people were talking, with a headache, and it made me feel alienated, and it was so weird. Finally I got to where I am now, where I do it but it doesn’t interfere with understanding what people are saying.” 

Annie Finch learned to meet her own needs! Good for her. I don’t begrudge her the evangelizing — I’m sure there are those like her that need what she needs and need to hear that it’s okay to need that and she is there to help them access it. Do I not need it? I mean, I feel a little sheepish not knowing — or caring — about the difference between an anapest and a trochee, a fritterlil and a poncydue. But I can live with it. 

Am I a real poet?

source:

“Conversation Between Annie Finch and Timothy Green”

Rattle #82

v.29 n.4

winter 2023

“You will ‘fail’”

“You will ‘fail’ often, by your own impossible standards, where ‘success' is never defined except as an abstract sense of bliss.” 

— Omar Sakr on the path of the poet

source:

“Tweets to a Queer Arab Poet” by Omar Sakr

This Arab Is Queer: an anthology by LGBTQ+ Arab writers

edited by Elias Jahshan

2022. Saqi Books, London UK

how they amused themselves

Of two 9th century Chinese poets:

“They both lived in poverty because of poetry until their deaths. And yet all their lives they amused themselves by writing lines about their suffering.”

source:

Mei Yao-ch’en and the Development of Early Sung* Poetry

Jonathan Chaves

1976. Columbia University Press, New York

*Sung is a ruling dynasty in China

Jesus, failed writer

I wasn’t sure what to make of Stephen Marche’s On Writing and Failure. Much of the essay is stories of writers down on their luck, the implication being that’s the standard situation. He stretches that to include famous and bestselling writers by suggesting they, too, often feel undervalued and ill-done-by. Marche digs back into history for the misfortunes of Herman Melville and Jane Austen, then much farther back to ancient China when Tu Fu and Li Po (or Du Fu and Li Bai, as Marche’s choice of transliteration spells them) wandered the nation trying to put together a living, or even back to Confucius who, it seems, couldn’t find a new patron and, one gets the sense, starved to death. The essay culminates with a paragraph on the Son of God:

Jesus Christ may be the most failed writer. He preached love as clearly and as evocatively as possible. In return, his friends betrayed him, his people turned against him, the authorities crucified him. After his death, his disciples gathered a bunch of his speeches into a handful of potted biographies that contradict one another and their world took to massacring his own people on the basis of what they thought he meant. Two thousand years later, Jesus has over a billion devoted fans. They get together, sometimes once a week or more, to read his stuff out loud* to each other. A career could not have gone much worse or better.

Well, that takes your thesis to the apex, Mr Marche. After reading the above I was even less sure what I was to take away. I don’t aspire to Jesus-level consequences for my work. I don’t even dream of paying the bills with my writing. I do suffer. Yeah. There’s that.

source:

On Writing and Failure

or, On the Peculiar Perseverance Required to Endure the Life of a Writer

by Stephen Marche

2023. Biblioasis, Windsor ONT Canada

*update 10/10/23: David in a comment notes that I posted this as "out lout" -- perhaps Jesus fans were trying to out lout each other? It was merely I typo so I am correcting it. Funny tho.

Think how?

Alexander Chee took a writing class at Wesleyan from Annie Dillard. In an essay describing his experience Chee lays out a lot of Dillard’s precepts on how to write well. 

In this passage Dillard is pushing her students to go back over their writing with one particular feature in mind:

Have you used the right verbs? Is that the precise verb for that precise thing? Remember that adverbs are a sign that you’ve used the wrong verb. Verbs control when something is happening in the mind of the reader. Think carefully.

Wait. What just happened? 

The last two words in the original text are a bit hidden. The whole written out goes: “Think carefully — when did this happen in relation to that? And is that how you’ve described it?”

You’d think, if the adverb was meant as a joke, it would stand on its own, not be tidied behind two concluding questions. But, hey, I laughed.

source:

How to Write an Autobiographical Novel: essays

by Alexander Chee

2018. Mariner Books / Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, New York

being a ghost

There are different kinds of writers. Ada Calhoun is one I’m not, that is, she’s a professional. She writes in order to pay the bills, so she writes to order. She is able to write to please people who will cut her a check. In her new memoir about failing to write a Frank O’Hara biography Calhoun describes some of her projects:

A few years ago, I got a call from my agent telling me that a celebrity needed someone to redo the twenty thousand words the first ghostwriter had done and then to finish the hundred-thousand-word manuscript in five weeks. The book came out and hit the New York Times bestseller list.

A couple of years after that, I sensed that a memoir on which I was the ghost might be in jeopardy. The celebrity was making sounds about the pages not sounding quite right, a red flag. I asked for a sample of writing that worked. Then I spent hours mapping the grammar of that sample, line by line, onto each story I’d been told. That book came out on time, and it, too, hit the New York Times bestseller list.

I wouldn’t be able to do this. I could probably mimic a preferred style for a page or two. Even then it would be torture. I remember back in the 90s when I was going to UC Berkeley, Fodor’s created a new travel guides imprint to compete with Lonely Planet. The Berkeley Guides were going to be hip and happening, man, and Fodor’s was going to take advantage of Berkeley’s rep for being counterculture, which Fodor’s definitely wasn’t. Fodor’s set up shop on or near campus — and began advertising for writers and editors. I took out an application, pored over it, and ultimately realized it was not for me, neither as editor nor as writer. I just can’t crank out copy. I can write, but I can’t write like that.

source: 

Also a Poet: Frank O’Hara, my father, and me

Ada Calhoun

2022. Grove Press, New York NY 

The structure of Oz

In her book on writing Ariel Gore uses The Wizard of Oz to illustrate “the classic five-act” structure for a novel. She calls it “the traditional Western male story structure that so much of modern prose relies on.”

Act I : “This is your background … This act shows your character in her known world, in her daily life, in her culture or subculture. This is Dorothy in Kansas before the tornado.”

Act II : “Your character faces a crisis and leaves something that is known for something that is unknown. … This is Dorothy landing in Oz.”

Act III : “This act introduces a complication or further conflict. Here your character faces tests, bumps in the road, a temptation or distraction from the goal. … This is Dorothy crossing a fast-moving river, falling asleep in the poppy field, seeking an audience with the Wizard.”

Act IV : “In this act, it appears that the forces of ‘evil’ will win out, the character will never reach her destination … Total defeat. The Wizard is a fraud.”

Act V : “There is a turn of events … that enables your character to resolve the problem, get to her destination or home again. … Dorothy realizes she has what she needs within herself to get home. Tap, tap, tap.”

Ariel Gore mixes up the original L. Frank Baum novel and the MGM movie adaptation somewhat. There’s no fast-moving river in the movie, but there is in the novel. There is no realization in the novel that Dorothy has always had everything she needs to get home. But it does take a sorceress to tell her the silver shoes will get her there, the very shoes she’s been wearing ever since she shook the dust of the Wicked Witch of the East out of them. Her companions, the Tin Woodman, the Scarecrow, and the Cowardly Lion, are the ones who already had what they needed within themselves.  

source:

How to Become a Famous Writer Before You’re Dead

by Ariel Gore

2007. Three Rivers Press / Crown Publishing / Random House

“make it impossible”

In an interview with a book editor, Ariel Gore asks for tips on the kind of query they would like to see. 

The editor shakes their head at “sloppy” authors who don’t “really put a lot of time and effort into making the best impression.” The editor goes on, “The sad truth is that, like everyone else, agents and editors are busy, and as much as we want to find the next book we can’t turn down, there is such a high volume of material coming in that it’s easier to find reasons to say no than to say yes.”

The editor concludes, “The author’s job is to make it impossible for us to say no.”

That’s what the author’s job is. The book is obviously secondary. You’d better be good at sales, author. You’d better be a real salesman. 

None of this is a new information. Since I was a kid I’ve been reading books on how to be a writer and achieve publication. But this is one of those things about being an author that I find discouraging. Sales. I’m no good at sales. 

The editor’s obvious disgust for authors is offputting, too. I get it. Editors are overwhelmed by the mass of manuscript that comes their way. On their bad days they’d prefer 99% of the hopefuls clogging their in-box would just drop dead. In order to stand out you’d better be good at jumping up and down on the page and shouting in just that way that demonstrates your brilliance, the million-selling potential of your product, your obedient and marketable personality, etc. 

I like to write. I get a lot of value out of it. Having written interesting things, I would like to find a publisher for them. But the sort of advice the editor is dishing up always depresses me. Make it impossible, they say. But that seems to be their job.

source:

How to Become a Famous Writer Before You’re Dead

by Ariel Gore

2007. Three Rivers Press / Crown Publishing / Random House

“thinking about other things”

In an essay in Poetry Matthew Bevis says:

[John] Ashbery once suggested that his poetry would be doing its job only if its audience was intermittently aware of it while thinking about other things at the same time.

Ashbery has certainly designed his poems to be hard to follow, impossible to follow, actually, that being one of his goals. Ashbery loves the slippery pronoun, especially “it.” To what is a particular “it” referring? It’s often impossible to know!

I’ve written poems, inspired by Ashbery among many another, that meander around, going in and out of narrative, go in and out of sense. I’ve even stood up before an audience at a reading and let them know that, as far as I’m concerned, it’s okay if their minds wander. “Tune in and out. You will still hear interesting things.”

source:

“In Search of Distraction”

by Matthew Bevis

Poetry

edited by Don Share

November 2017, vol. 211 no. 2

Chicago, IL

Notes Toward an Autobiography by Others

David Trinidad draws a portrait of his mother and their relationship in his poem “Classic Layer Cakes.” I was glad to see she was supportive of his art. For instance when Trinidad visits his mother “in an extended care facility in Santa Maria[:]

The first thing [my mother] said to me was: ‘Did you bring me a poem?’

That’s something my mother would have said to me. Having a parent’s encouragement for devoting yourself to impractical things — like poetry — is heartening. 

My mother didn’t always love my poems. Like my husband, she praised some over others, but she got good at listening and making vaguely approving, nonjudgmental comments when the poem went off somewhere she didn’t follow. 

She loved coming to my readings and introducing herself around as the poet’s mother. This was embarrassing for me, of course, and I think I asked her once not to do it, but not vehemently — mumblingly, probably. Anyway, I decided it was tolerable embarrassment and sweet. She was supporting me, sharing my enthusiasm, and proud of me. 

source: Dear Prudence: new and selected poems

by David Trinidad

2011. Turtle Point Press, New York

“The Footsteps,” a poem by Jonathan Hayes

The Footsteps

for Glenn Ingersoll

Are in the pome

Side by side with each word

Keeping cadence or wandering

Depending on the next …

#

I didn’t know Jonathan Hayes had dedicated a poem to me. So when I came upon it in his book, A Full Moon in Santa Cruz, I was surprised. But what really strikes me — is that it kinda sounds like me. Not just that it’s roughly in the poem poem genre, a poem talking about itself, often with a sense of self-awareness (I’ve done a whole series of those), but that it has that “wandering” in it, that readiness to enjoy uncertainty that I think of as one of things I need in poetry. Where are we going next? Let’s find out together! 

Jonathan Hayes is also the editor of the literary magazine, Over the Transom, and the anthology, —ah: American haiku anthology. 

source: A Full Moon in Santa Cruz

poems by Jonathan Hayes

2018. Mel C. Thompson Publishing, Lafayette CA

possible epigraph for Autobiography of a Book

I opened the closet

That I had closed in my youth.

The love book that I had left

Was covered with dust

The dust that covered it

I shook it off

The book said: Who is waking me up?

from “Love, Love, Love” by Lounis Ait Menguellet

translation from Tamazight by Rabah Seffal

source: Poems for the Millennium, vol. 2: The University of California book of North African literature 

edited by Pierre Joris and Habib Tengour

2012. University of California Press, Berkeley CA

a poet’s accounting

I’ve never before seen an accounting of a poet’s earnings for a poem. So when I came across the one below in the notes at the back of the Best American Poetry anthology, I took note. 

Thomas Sayers Ellis writes:

I was paid $2,230 for the publication of [my poem] in Poetry magazine, $250 for the recording of the poem for the Poetry Foundation’s podcast; and $500 more, by the Poetry Foundation, when the poem received the Salmon O. Levinson Prize. The appearance of ‘Vernacular Owl’ in this anthology will add $100, bringing the total to $3,080[.]

The poem takes up seven pages, so the original payment works out to about $320 per page. Not bad! I know the Poetry Foundation is awash in money due to a bequest from someone superrich, so I’m glad to see that they are paying poets decently. And they don’t charge reading fees. It would be nice if they took a little less time to make a decision, though. It’s been six months since I sent them poems. 

source: Best American Poetry 2015 Sherman Alexie, editor; series editor, David Lehman. Scribner Poetry / Simon & Schuster, New York

another possible epigraph

A year ago I put up a post that included a few lines I thought might make a good epigraph for “Autobiography of a Book.”

This poem by the Greek poet Strato of Sardis has good possibilities as an epigraph too:

Lucky little scroll, I am not jealous. Some boy

while reading you might squeeze you, touch his chin with you,

or press you to his dainty lips, or even place you on 

his tender thighs to roll you up, most blessedest of scrolls.

You will often rest there on his bosom, and when he puts 

you on his chair, fearless you will dare caress his bottom.

You will hold conversations all alone with him.

I beg you, little scroll, put in a word for me quite often.

Scrolls were the book equivalent of the time. Strato was writing in the second century A. D. The translation is by James J. Wilhelm.

source: Gay and Lesbian Poetry: an anthology from Sappho to Michelangelo

edited by James J. Wilhelm
1995. Garland Publishing, New York

David Wagoner changes his mind about simultaneous submissions, maybe

In the introduction to his number of Best American Poetry guest editor David Wagoner writes: 

On December 1, 2007, the first day this anthology was assigned to cover, I submitted poems of mine to fifty American magazines. I hadn’t been sending out work recently and had been prolific for a while, and I thought I’d find out how prompt the poetry editors in this country were being nowadays. The prizewinner … took only four days to reply. After three months, I’d heard from one-third. After six months, I’d heard from a little over half. The losers are the nine magazines who still haven’t replied, though thirteen months have passed. The editors in the last group are difficult to excuse. … It’s no wonder many poets have turned to multiple submissions: sending the same set of poems to two or more magazines at the same time.

The term of art these days, as I understand it, is “simultaneous submission.” The term “multiple submission” seems to refer to sending more than one submission in a short period of time, that is, before the editors have dealt with the first poems. I remember back in my Berkeley Poetry Review days writing to a prolific poet and asking her not to send more than one batch of poems during our reading period. This was after we editors had gathered together three to five of her fat poem-stuffed envelopes. (How could she afford that much postage?) 

I edited Poetry Northwest for thirty-six years [Wagoner continues] and made it my policy early on not to consider [simultaneous submissions] if I could help it. I also made it my policy not to make any poet wait longer than a month — usually it was closer to two weeks — for a decision. But I became more and more lenient as the years went by and I learned how long most other editors were making poets wait.”

Lenient? Wagoner means he started allowing simultaneous submission? Did he ever explicitly change the policy, or did he just decide not to ban the simultaneous submitters he found out about? Poetry Northwest was by no means unusual in hating on simultaneous submissions. In fact, the method was long anathema to editors. Editors are jealous of their time and efforts and hate loving a poem only to find someone else loved it first, thus depriving them not only of the poem but of making them waste their supremely valuable time and joy. On the other hand, a simultaneous submissions ban shows little respect for the time and effort of the poets. 

Wagoner prides himself on a turnaround time of less than a month. Respectable, yes. But it still means that if a poet has a ten percent acceptance rate it will take a year on average to place a poem. I guess that’s okay with David Wagoner. 

In the bio and notes section in the back of BAP poet Michael Johnson writes of his poem, “How to Be Eaten By a Lion” : “[The poem] ended up getting turned down over fifty times …”

That’s five years of rejection under David Wagoner’s respectable time frame. And fifty years if the poet sends to magazines edited by those Wagoner calls “the losers.” Yet Michael Johnson’s poem ultimately so impressed the editor(s) of Best American Poetry that it got featured in that highly exclusive annual. So it’s not like it was just a bad poem, naturally being rejected due to its obvious unworthiness. 

source: The Best American Poetry 2009 David Wagoner, editor; David Lehman, series editor. Scribner Poetry / Simon & Schuster, New York

“the solid permanence of publication”

I share some of Anne Trubek’s puzzlement here:

As a writer myself, I must admit to being somewhat confused by dancers and stage actors and chefs. All that work, I think, all that practice and preparation and effort, for what? An ephemeral product, an hour or two on stage, a meal to be eaten? How does one put so much into something that will only dissipate and dissolve into the slipstream of unreliable memory? Writers choose words as their metier partially out of a desire for the solid permanence that publication, reading, and rereading provide.

“[T]he solid permanence of publication” is only solidly permanent in comparison to a dance performance or a soup slurped up. Libraries burn, books sop up flood waters and feed mildew spores. Even the bestselling and awardwinning fade from cultural consciousness. 

The poets in my poetry group have a running joke. “What does it matter?” someone says, usually me. Then comes the attempt to come up with a reason why it matters. This got started when one of my poet friends, in frustration, asked me whether I thought publication in little magazines or ezines “matters.” I stammered that book publishers like to see a track record of publication. They want to see you’ve built an audience, a reputation. They want to see that you are acting professionally, putting your work before editors and, presumably, learning from the experience. They look at prior publication as evidence of commitment, as a publisher wants the writers they publish to participate in the marketing of the finished book. These are things I’ve read in all the years I’ve been reading advice to writers. 

But do publishers really care about prior publication? If they love the work, does prior publication matter? I suspect publishers like the reassurance that their favorable opinion is not unique. They’re human, too! 

But does a book matter? Does it matter whether anybody reads what you’ve written? 

This is when I slide over to spiritual justification. Everything matters. Each breath, each bowing of a leaf before the wind, each turn of the red storm on Jupiter. Because every thing that happens makes the world. And we make ourselves and each other and art is one of the intentional and careful ways we do that. 

source: A Skeptic’s Guide to Writer’s Houses by Anne Trubek

possible epigraph

once I gave a party
and some of the people who should have come, didn't,
but all of my books were there,
enjoying themselves immensely,
murmuring lightly,
and discussing so many things

*

lines from "Books" by William Baer
as the poem appears in Anthology of Magazine Verse and Yearbook of American Poetry 1981, edited by Alan F. Pater

I wonder if these lines would make a good epigraph for Autobiography of a Book.

“the primitive pleasures of serendipitous art”

As a teen I discovered found poetry, and I quickly became infatuated. I have kept my eye out for source texts ever since. First line indexes of poetry anthologies can be fruitful. Back in the early 90s when I was an undergrad at the University of California at Berkeley the first line index in An Anthology of New York Poets edited by Ron Padgett and David Shapiro really got me excited. I was working at the university’s main library. Perhaps it was the New York poets anthology that inspired me to turn library search results into poems. I compiled as many title lists as I could think of. Some worked as poems immediately; some worked with massaging; most, frustratingly, refused my efforts. But it was a lot of fun, especially when I was assigned to the desk and there was dead time. I could even print out some of the lists, which saved my writing hand.

In his essay about his boyhood obsession with Classics Illustrated comics Gary Giddins talks about his hunt for some of the adaptations that he knew only by their appearing on a list in the back of issues he did own. The more obscure titles (Mr. Midshipman Easy, The Black Tulip, for example) just weren’t available. Attempts to order them from the publisher could net an entirely different issue, too often one that Giddins already had. Left only with the titles and no other information, the young Giddins found some distraction in reading the lists for themselves, as though they were stories, or maybe poems.

William Gass has written that ‘lists are juxtapositions, and exhibit many of the qualities of collage.” They may, in fact, offer the primitive pleasures of serendipitous art. A computerized list, for example, of the popular songs published during the first half of the twentieth century reveals an infinite treasury of found poems: Flip to any page, put your finger on any title, and track the first ten songs upward or down, and voila, instant lit. Lists of artworks are serendipitous and canonical, too … also publishers’ catalogs and individual work-lists.”

I have gotten some of the library database lists published as poems.

source: Give Our Regards to the Atomsmashers: writers on comics edited by Sean Howe

Notes toward an autobiography by others

In her book The Argonauts Maggie Nelson says:

My writing is riddled with … tics of uncertainty. I have no excuse or solution, save to allow myself the tremblings, then go back in later and slash them out. In this way I edit myself into a boldness that is neither native nor foreign to me.

I was surprised once when someone told me after a poetry reading, “You speak with such authority.” Like Maggie Nelson I grew up including “tics of uncertainty” in my writing. It reflected my thinking, didn’t it? Who really knows. Knows! Being certain of something should make you suspicious. Be open to other possibilities and, at least occasionally, what seems impossible.

I remember as a kid there was a period I added the word “no” to anything sarcastic, i.e., “That’s the most beautiful dirt clod I’ve ever seen — no!” I don’t know how I picked it up, and I don’t remember anybody bringing my use of it to my attention, but at some point it hit my ear wrong. Why was I so frequently contradicting myself? It took conscious work to purge the “no”. 

When I noticed I was constantly using phrases like “I think” and “it seems to me” in my writing and that other writers weren’t I wondered where the difference was. Were the others writing what they thought? Yes. You are reading them to find out what they think, I said to myself. They don’t have to write “I think” because it is understood that what they are writing is what they think. This made sense to me. So whenever “I think” appeared redundant — “I think ice cream is too cold!” — I would cut it out. “Ice cream is too cold!” is not a universal opinion thus I must not be speaking for everyone. I must be speaking for myself!

Leaving out “tics of uncertainty” creates an illusion of certainty. Or, as Maggie Nelson says, evokes “a boldness that is neither native nor foreign to [the speaker].” You get used to figuring out whether the person speaking is speaking from a place of authority, a place of personal experience, a place of knowledge, by following their argument a bit. Does it hold together? Does it make sense? Does it match your experience? They may be more wrong than right but still be worth attending to. 

Nelson goes on to say she opens a lot of her letters or emails with “Sorry,” as in “Sorry for the delay. Sorry for the confusion. Sorry for whatever.” She adds, “I’ve had to train myself to wipe the sorry off.”

I’ve done that too. Who really cares that I’m sorry when I haven’t written a blog post in months? You’re writing one now, Glenn. What is it you’re putting fingers to keyboard to say? Other than that you are sorry, of course. Other than that you are terribly sorry and you feel bad about neglecting the blog and doing other things which are not important either.

source: The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson

Good work is good work

Clearly Meant is a thrice-yearly interview and reading series I host at the Berkeley Public Library’s Claremont Branch. The reading takes place on a Saturday afternoon, from 2:00 to 3:00. The second year of the series finished up in June. 

The series is fairly unusual in that it is a small local reading that focuses on one poet. The poet reads her work, then sits for an interview with me and a discussion with the audience. There is no open mic.

To get word out about the poet and the reading I create an eight page chapbook that is handed out free at every library branch. I make fliers and post them. I list the reading in local online event calendars. BPL has a Facebook page and I try to get the reading promoted through that.  

Audience turnout, however, really depends on whether the poet promotes the reading to her friends and fans. If the poet doesn’t bring in friends and fans, we have a small audience. There just aren’t many who will show up for a reading by an unknown poet.

The smallest audience we had up to this June was a turnout of eight, if I remember right. That was for the most well-known of the poets I’ve so far invited. I figured the small turnout was because the poet didn’t expend much effort at promotion. That’s fine. Promotion shouldn’t be the poet’s job. Promoting is a separate energy and different from creating. Our other events have drawn 15 to 20 attendees. 

Until this June. The Clearly Meant for June had a grand total of one audience member. 

I’ve been a featured reader where that sort of thing has happened. You could cancel, I suppose, but there you are, holding your stack of poems, a little magazine bookmarked with its pink Post-It, you’ve practiced your patter. I bet there are people who have performed to a totally empty room. 

If the room were totally empty I imagine I would walk away. But if one person is there, well, when you read to an audience of any size each person hears your words as one person, you might as well let your poems out of silence to the person who has brought her ears.

The June poet read for us, an audience of two: me and the audience member who was also a poet. He uses the Claremont Branch frequently and has come to other Clearly Meant readings. The June poet and I sat down for the interview. After some Q&A we added our audience member and he was pretty interesting too.

I chose the June poet partly because I knew she was very active in the community. She hosts a reading series at a bookstore. She helps organize an annual poetry festival. I see her at literary events around the area. I looked forward to a lively discussion with her and her fans. 

Perhaps the turnout was small because another poetry event was scheduled at the same time at another branch of the library. Perhaps the turnout was small because it was an unusually hot day and people considering their options chose against the one that required sitting in a little unair-conditioned room. After the reading, the June poet told me the Clearly Meant reading was one of three events where she was featured that weekend. Perhaps the turnout was small because she was overexposed. Perhaps it was just random. We pay the featured poet (another rare thing for a poetry series), so having a tiny audience is looked at askance by the budget people. A series very few attend is a series that gets canceled. That’s too bad, but that’s what happens. 

I’m prepping for another Clearly Meant in October. I’ve designed the flier and am working on the chapbook. I get paid for putting this all together because Clearly Meant is an official library program. Good for me! It’s nice to be paid for something you like to do. Even people who don’t attend the reading will read the poet’s work because the chapbooks do get picked up. That’s a good thing. Anyway, good work is good work. I hope we get a room full of eager listeners in October. But who knows?

In July I was reading a collection of essays by Kim Addonizio, a writer who lives in Oakland. Kim Addonizio has published books of poetry, novels, a couple books on how to write. She’s almost famous! But her essay “How to Succeed in Po Biz” is a jumble of anxieties and mishaps. 

“Many are they who harbor the burning desire to become successful poets and rise to the top of their profession,” Addonizio begins. “To see one’s name on the cover of a slender paperback, to have tens and perhaps even dozens of readers, to ascend to a lecture podium in a modest-size auditorium after being introduced by the less successful poet, who is unsure of the pronunciation of your name — these are heady rewards.” 

Note the number of readers the “successful poet at the top of [her] profession” can expect: “tens.” It’s sarcasm. But it’s true. I would be “the less successful poet” in this scenario. 

Later in the essay, Addonizio spins out a more dramatic version of the reading. Besides the negotiation over the honorarium and the rigors of travel, Addonizio contemplates how unsociable she is. “You are a writer, after all, and prefer to be alone in your own house with your cat. You don’t really like your fellow humans, except for your boyfriend, whose stories and mannerisms can be usefully stolen and put into your writing.” Ultimately the reading takes place before “an audience of three in a six-hundred-seat auditorium. …Tell yourself [i]t is the work that you love, and sometimes you even get paid for it. Tell yourself you are lucky, that people envy you.”

source: Bukowski in a Sundress: confessions from a writing life by Kim Addonizio. 2016. Penguin Books, New York.