Never?

In a recent post, Amy King (thanks, Kelli, for the link) warns about all the fame and glory a poet will never get. No sudden discovery. No overnight success. Not like the musician with his EP, or the scientist with her Eureka! moment.

What? Never? No Pushcart nomination? No Pushcart prize, no poem in Best American Poetry, no reading at the 92nd Street Y?

The title of the post is "Poetry Is to Money as Ice Cream is to Mud," and I won't argue that point.

But never is such a long time.

Okay, that cat's out of the bag. Don't ask me why, but I harbor certain hopes. Maybe it's vanity or maybe it's a thirst for validation. Should it be necessary to have that validation? Is it why I write? No on both counts. But I have my hopes just as the person who buys lottery tickets has hopes. My submissions are my lottery tickets. (The lottery probably has better odds.)

This morning, that reminded me of something my friend Gina told me about two kinds of genius: the Mozart kind, where you're immediately obviously blindingly gifted and brilliant, and the Beethoven kind, where you just keep working hard. That was back in the '80s.

Fast forward to now, and Gina has been working hard all along. You can read more about what she's been up to in this profile that appeared in Vanity Fair. The same goes for Pat Graney, who has always followed her own vision. And, as I've mentioned before, Ross Palmer Beecher, who has over the years kept an amazing work ethic and kept making art, which you can see here and here and here.

It is about doing it. It is, for me, about the writing--and it's about sharing that writing, reading it and publishing it, they way you perform a dance or hang a painting.

And I'm still not ready to say Never.

One little silver lining

Most poets don't make a lot of money, or maybe any money, by writing poetry. It is largely an unpaid art.

However—

Even as the rejections have been arriving, steady as the gray rain, I realized in one moment yesterday that I didn't have to care all that much. I can take comfort in the writing, the act of creating, the doing of it. That is a lovely luxury.

A poem a day, or not

At the beginning of September, I decided that I should write about food and that I should write a poem every day—hence, a poem a day about food. I also decided that I should do a free write for my next direction every day.

Success was marginal.

I found that my "poems" were more like free writes and mostly didn't even have titles. And I found that my free writes were more restricted than I want, as though they were trying to be poems right away.

And I missed a day, but only one.

So I think I'll take the whole batch, or both batches, and hide them away for a few months.

In the meantime, in this year's Poet's Market (I am so old fashioned) I found a magazine that publishes poems about food: Alimentum, the Literature of Food.

P.S. Last week I mentioned writing response poems. My earlier effort at this is posted this week on the sofa.

2 bits & 1 longer thought

My son's 11th grade language arts teacher told the students that, because they were 16 or 17, they could write a love sonnet. My son worked on this all weekend. Sunday night, I asked him if he had finished it. He said that he had—but that it was not about love, exactly. It was about toast. His first line: I can handle toast.

*****

In a previous post, I talked a little bit about my poetry goals. The other day, I was discussing them with someone (probably with at least a little frustration), and he asked me this: If I achieved them—or even some of them—how would I feel? Would it change who I am? Hmmm...

*****

This past week, I've been reading Fence Above the Sea, by Brigitte Byrd (Ahsahta Press). Most of the poems in the book are in prose poem, or short short, format. They have a stream of consciousness feeling, and they carry through and return to certain phrases, certain themes. They also weave phrases of French (I plan to go back and reread them when I have my dictionary nearby).

The resulting images are tactile and surreal at the same time, and I find the work inspiring. It's so different from the poems that I've been writing, and I can feel myself being nudged into a new direction.

To me, this is the value of reading—and reading work in a variety of styles and voices. I might try on someone else's style, an exercise used in writing classes. It's fun to bust out and do something unfamiliar. It gives me a chance to explore other parts of myself and other ways that I can express that self. And even if the poem starts out sounding like the poet, it will change as I revise it. It will, for better or worse, become mine. It's just good to stretch.

How do you stretch? What are you reading?