Imagine if Keats had had a blog.

I’m thinking about the possibility of responding to his critics. The critical response to Endymion was harsh, as Keats himself foresaw it would be. Leigh Hunt and his “cockney school” had already been savaged in the press. Keats sensed the inherent weakness of his long poem — which is bad, though it contains many brilliant parts — and famously tried to head off the critics by writing an apologetic preface, in which he admits that the poem exhibits “great inexperience, immaturity, and every error denoting a feverish attempt, rather than a deed accomplished.” He adds that if he felt he could improve the poem in a meaningful way, he would not allow it to be printed; and that he’s not attempting to “forestall criticisms”; but that he hopes to “conciliate men” who will see — what, exactly? What the poem or the poet could be in time? At any rate, needless to say, it didn’t work.

It was the age of newspapers in Britain. There were dozens of them that printed frequent, scathing, highly involved reviews, not just of poetry and literature but the burgeoning London theater as well. Lord Byron had already had his go-round, as a fledgling poet, with the critics; his response was the long satirical poem “English Bards and Scotch Reviewers” (over 1,000 lines!) in which he lambastes seemingly anyone who had ever slighted him, in fact or perception (or might ever think of slighting him in the future). Here’s what he has to say about Coleridge:

Shall gentle Coleridge pass unnoticed here,
To turgid ode and tumid stanza dear?
Though themes of innocence amuse him best,
Yet still obscurity’s a welcome guest.
If Inspiration should her aid refuse
To him who takes a pixy for a muse,
Yet none in lofty numbers can surpass
The bard who soars to elegise an ass.
So well the subject suits his noble mind,
He brays, the laureat of the long-ear’d kind.

(Seriously, is there anything Byron couldn’t do as a poet? Satire, comedy, epic, elegy, lyric… he could do it all.) The above, incidentally, did not make Coleridge flinch from groveling at the younger poet’s feet when Byron held creative control at Drury Lane, one of only two “patent” theaters in London, and Coleridge was desperate to break back into the theater… But that’s another story.

After Keats’s first volume appeared, he was attacked on two fronts: the aptly named John Croker wrote a negative piece in the April 1818 Quarterly Review, and this was followed by an even more biting and personal critique in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, August 1818, written by “Z” (John Lockhart). (Click here for an excellent site that compiles both reviews, as well as links to Leigh Hunt’s enthusiastic introduction of Keats, and Lord Byron’s various put-downs.) What was obvious even then was that the reviews had as much, or more, to do with attacking Leigh Hunt and his circle as they did with singling out Keats.

Croker admits straight away that he hasn’t thoroughly read the poetry. He actually compliments Keats as a writer possessing “powers of language, rays of fancy, and gleams of genius,” before lamenting that he’s fallen under the spell of Mr. Hunt.

Lockhart, meanwhile, frames his review squarely in terms of class and the whole problem of the unlearned, “Cockney” school. He begins by complaining about the spread of literacy and the desire to write to the lower classes — “our very footmen compose tragedies,” etc. — then ridicules Keats for his association with figures like Hunt and Haydon, hardly mentions the poetry at all (come to think of it, he likely read even less of it than Croker had), and finally advises Keats to take up his erstwhile career in medicine — “It is a better and a wiser thing to be a starved apothecary than a starved poet; so back to the shop Mr John.” To me, this is the far more dismissive and damaging review, clearly aimed at strangling Keats’s career at birth. It’s no wonder it was published under a pseudonym.

I suppose all of this shows that literary criticism 200 years ago could be every bit as harsh and unfair as it can be today.

But there’s a difference. And I’m not even sure that the biggest difference is the fact that so much of it’s now digital, and online. After all, as noted above, there were a great many literary reviews and media devoted to poetry and theater, so many that one could reasonably expect that just about every new publication or production of any note would find a critical response, and fairly quickly at that. There was already the issue of “anonymous” reviews, in which inhibitions about what one might say, as well as any pretense about fairness, could be cast aside.

Rather, the difference I’m concerned with is made possible by criticism migrating online, in the form of blogs etc., but it’s got nothing to do with increased volume or frequency or speed. It’s the simple fact that authors, as well as their allies and enemies, can instantly respond to any critique, either in the comments threads that so many blogs maintain, or on blogs of their own (and now, of course, ancillary discussions can take place on Facebook and Twitter).

On the face of it, this remarkable democratization of the critical space is a wonderful thing. Along with the increased presence of women authors and publishers, diversity of voices in the small press world, and access to alternatives to the mainstream press, it would seem to be a wholly positive development. But there’s a problem…

The recent shutting down of the comments thread (and erasure of all previous comments) at Silliman’s blog has been much remarked upon. In a recent post on The Compass Rose, Curtis Faville, one of the writers whose frequent comments were wiped out by Silliman, takes aim at Jessica Smith, whose own blog post about the harsh comments on Silliman’s blog — in the most recent case following a positive review of Joseph Massey’s book, but also stretching back to a positive review of Smith’s own poetry — is widely seen as precipitating Silliman’s extreme measures.

Got all that? The reason I’m focusing on Faville’s post is that his remarks, and the comments thread that accompanies it, neatly (actually, not neatly… maddeningly, yuckily, sickeningly) provides a case study in the positive and negative aspects of blogging and comments threads in general. I wouldn’t go so far as to say it proves Smith’s point. But Faville’s post, which already pushes the envelope of getting personally insulting and sarcastically dismissive with regards to Smith, is then followed by chiming in from various parties (and Faville himself, responding to them), some anonymous or pseudonymous, some not, that’s stomach-turning in its whacked off-kilteredness.

I’ve been reading Freud’s Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. In explaining how jokes come to be made, he writes

Let us assume that there is an urge to insult a certain person; but this is so strongly opposed by feelings of propriety or of aesthetic culture that the insult cannot take place. If, for instance, it were able to break through as a result of some change of emotional condition or mood, this breakthrough by the insulting purpose would be felt subsequently with unpleasure. Thus the insult does not take place. Let us now suppose, however, that the possibility is presented of deriving a good joke from the material of words and thoughts used for the insult — the possibility, that is, of releasing pleasure from other sources which are not obstructed by the same suppression. This second development of pleasure could, nevertheless, not occur unless the insult were permitted; but as soon as the latter is permitted the new release of pleasure is also joined to it. Experience with tendentious jokes shows that in such circumstances the suppressed purpose can, with the assistance of the joke, gain sufficient strength to overcome the inhibition, which would otherwise be stronger than it. The insult takes place, because the joke is thus made possible…

Essentially, what I read here is that repression makes jokes not only possible, but necessary. We want to insult someone; we can’t do it to his or her face; our unconscious works to overcome this inhibition by framing the insult inside a good joke, then smuggling it up to consciousness via that joke. (Needless to say, there’s a parallel here with dream-work that Freud himself draws, and one with the work of poetry that poets might draw.)

The implications of this when it comes to online writing, especially comments threads — not only on blogs but, as Faville points out, everywhere on the web — are really staggering. Cloaked in anonymity and far removed from personal contact with the object of their scorn, comments authors have no inhibitions. Nothing prevents naked biases, hatreds, prejudices, vitriol, etc., from bubbling straight up to the surface and spewing forth. This might explain why so many blog and online newspaper comments are so humorless, ugly, and mean-spirited, saying far more about the anxieties and insecurities of the comment authors themselves than whatever the topic is. (I already noted that Lockhart published his mean-spirited, anxiety-ridden review of Keats simply as “Z.”)

I would invite you to peruse Faville’s post, and then the comments thread, and see if you see what I mean. The post itself begins by insulting Smith (”Looky-Touchy-Feely”), goes on to direct some anger at Silliman for seeming to cave in to her demands, then sarcastically considers some of Smith’s complaints on her own post about comments threads, before lecturing her on the realities and rigors of literary criticism.

The comments thread is, as I say, a case study in off-topic jibes and insults. It starts off that way and only gets worse, with Jim Behrle jumping in to trade barbs with Faville, followed by more personal insults among Kirby Olson and various anonymous figures, and winds up some 60 comments later with an actual challenge to a duel… You really can’t make this stuff up.

But I want to close by imagining Keats with access to his own blog (perhaps called “The Pot of Basil”) — and Twitter account; my friend Sarah once provided the perfect name for it: “Keats Tweets”. Would Keats have written a response to his harshest critics, complaining about the ad hominem nature of their attacks, calling out “Z.” and demanding to know his identity? Would Byron have jumped in under a pseudonym in the comments thread, perhaps calling himself “Manfred” or taking a name from his beloved Greeks, insulting Keats for his short stature and urging him to quit writing poems?

Would Keats have tweeted something terse and pithy, a variation on what he wrote to John Taylor in 1818: “But it is easier to think what poetry should be, than to write it”?

I like to think so…

M. came into the office this morning, worked quietly for an hour, and then suddenly announced to G. (who sat in the cubicle next to her) that she got married yesterday. The news spread like a virus, until people stood up from their desks beaming at her from across the room, congratulating her and asking questions. She was then given the rest of the day off

01.29.99

For a long time we didn’t realize we were living under water; now that we know, no effort is being spared to rectify the situation

03.04.99

There was a moment of absolute weightlessness before the bus moved—I hung there, frozen in the act of bending forward to remove my backpack before sitting down. Then the bus moved, and I was poured into the lap of a young woman, who smiled faintly at my apology

03.09.99

The couple, seated together at a small table with an astonishing array of food between them—sodas, carrots, salad, bagels—both eating and looking down into books, not speaking. But when something amusing came up from one of the books, it passed through both of them simultaneously, in identical expressions, small smiles that pointed not at each other but down

03.23.99

She notices her from across the aisle on the bus.

“Sarah?”

The other one, who’s been eating an apple, acknowledges this address grudgingly, as though roused from sleep. They begin to talk, leaning to see each other through a forest of arms and legs. Both girls are frumpy, hippie types, hair greasy, voices full of “like” and “yeah.” The first croaks yeah, the second responds with a bloated, weary yeahh; gradually they’re drawn into a rhythm, searching for something to talk about: a friend’s new band which had played at the Tip Top, another friend who’s driving out from Ohio for the summer—“So we’ll have some wheels…” Immediately this friend takes on a life of her own, I picture her driving the interstate in the colorless light of dawn, cruising the plains into Iowa, then pointing her car into the sun’s long shadows through Nebraska and Colorado. She seems infinitely more sensible to me than these two, more down to earth, better groomed, simply because she’s from somewhere else and “has never been to California.” Yet with chagrin I see her arrive, and let her jeans grow threadbare, and her hair go unwashed, a greasy nest of barrettes and blackened roots

03.25.99

The waiter prepared the two salads on little plates, shredded greens and carrots smeared with dressing, and then, somehow holding them in one hand, with the other he slipped a spoon carefully into a full glass of wine, skimming something off the surface

The page also has first dibs if he simply wants to keep the books for himself. That’s where I come in. During my time working as a page at the San Francisco Public Library, my personal library expanded by several hundred items, including not just books but a fair number of LPs — an amazing collection of musical soundtracks (Cabaret, Bye-Bye Birdie, Sweet Charity…) was once dropped off at the Noe Valley Branch, at the very moment I was working on some songs for a play I’d written… I doubt this is what the people donating those materials envisioned when they left their bundles. Yet by and large I’ve enjoyed and taken good care of my scavengings, and during my time at the SFPL I even unearthed some pretty valuable gems.

Moment, A Selection of Poems and Stories by Vincent Giuliano, is not one of them. At least not in any conventional sense. You won’t find this author on the web (no hits on Google). You will, remarkably, find two copies of the book on Amazon, one selling for the why-bother amount of $3. The book itself runs to 174pp, perfect-bound, with a non-glossy cover stock and a simple design. No publisher information, bar code, or ISBN; the copyright belongs to “The Estate of Vincent S. Giuliano.” Glancing through it that day in the library, I quickly deduced that Giulano, born just a couple years before me, had moved to San Francisco as a young man to pursue poetry, and died in mysterious circumstances at age 23, leaving behind the poems and writings I now held in my hands.

I immediately knew I couldn’t send the book along for processing. Without a “real” publisher and Library of Congress info, it was bound to be discarded, and even if it did somehow make it into circulation, it was destined to be one of those books that sits on the shelf for years, anonymous and neglected — somehow an even worse fate than immediate disposal. I kept it. Over time I read bits and pieces of the writing. All this revealed was that I had not uncovered a 2nd Keats — Giuliano had not been a genius. The writing was competent, precocious, and young.

Before getting to that, though… The far more interesting aspect of the book, to me, was the story behind it. Around this time, I had been writing a review of Kent Johnson’s project The Miseries of Poetry: Traductions from the Greek (Skanky Possum, 2003) which would eventually appear in the Chicago Review. In that text, it’s explained that Johnson’s collaborator, Alexandra Papaditsas, has died mysteriously, perhaps owing to complications from her unusual condition, Cornuexcretis phalloides, which caused a horn to grow from her head… Like Johnson’s association with the famous Yasusada project, a tragedy underwrites and complicates the authenticity of the text, immediately setting in motion what we might call the “dead author effect.”

In short — as I argue in greater detail in my review — we want to believe in the dead author. We are predisposed to believe in him, perhaps because of stories like that of Keats. We are attracted to the idea of genius cut down young, before it’s had a chance to fully bloom. We are pulled in by the romance and the pathos, and — most importantly — we invest the writing with some added layer of meaning because of this. All of which, I argued, in Johnson’s hands becomes a radical critique of authorship and the “author function,” as well as our susceptibility to it — a much more pointed and entertaining critique, I believe, than that offered by other avant strategies.

The set-up with Giuliano’s book seems cut straight from this cloth. In the brief introduction, written by Bruce Giuliano (father? brother?), we are told that young Vincent was so passionate about poetry and life that he quickly inspired deep and loyal friendships in San Francisco — no mean feat — and, the part that gets me, his bosses and coworkers at his office job were so taken with him that, after his death, they helped select writings, design, and finance publication of the book.

That death was duly romantic and mysterious. The description of it is worth reproducing:

Perhaps it was passion that put him on the water, rowing alone, that unusually cold and windy April morning. Perhaps it was the intensity of his determination that made him oblivious to what was happening to him. Whatever it was, he never completed that morning row. Shortly after sunrise — his favorite time of day — after capsizing and struggling on, he lost consciousness, went into the water again, and drowned.

I’ve read this evocative but vague passage many times, and I’m never not moved by it. I don’t think Johnson himself could have set the scene any better. Passion… intensity… sunrise… It just grabs me and pulls me in, and I’m about as prepared as I can be to sympathize with the poetry that follows.

Unfortunately, as I mentioned above, it’s not that good.

It does show promise. Giuliano definitely felt things deeply, and was driven to write about them, and communicate the excitement he felt about the things and people around him. He did not yet have a good feeling for contrasts and subtleties, the ability to sift sensation down to the apt combination of word and sound — did not yet have “the knowledge of contrast, feeling for light and shade, all that information (primitive sense) necessary for a poem” (which is the Keats quote that I use as a motto for this blog). He had — thankfully — moved way beyond the doggerel-type stylings many young poets, myself included, attempt at an early age, to a longish, variable, free-verse line. But he had not really begun to experiment beyond this, in a way that would indicate a deep engagement with some other poet or poets, and that weird thing we call poetics, so that one might understand what the particular matter of his poetry was, or would be.

Mostly, he tended to write in a straightforward, Bukowski-like style, responding to specific moments and places. Here’s part of a poem (they’re mostly quite long):

The Pear-Apple

A sanguine anger and
the frustrated love
of my lady
skip through the things I really must do
and leave my affairs in disarray.

My life now is a collection of papers
some in a file, some laying about
some
after this last attack
sill floating, doubling back
on their way to settling softly in the mud.

You would admire me
and what I have just done today
in the way of a train ride
in the way of not being afraid
in the way of defying a pool of puke
simply because I felt like
it was time.

There was a new fruit
a sweet thing I have never seen
and there was fog rolling
boiling over the hill
tumbling across the bay
chasing the train covering over
the sky shining sunset lavender
and blue pink orange red
you hardly ever see a rainbow these days.

…

There’s lots to admire here. The opening is stunning, reminiscent of the bold lines of another poet who died far too young, Jeffrey Miller. Also, there’s the easy confidence of the voice, the fluid swerve between the internal and external, the unhurried use of image (in the second stanza), and most remarkable for such a young poet, the lack of strained metaphor and other poetic “effects” that even much older poets often can’t resist. The last stanza I’ve quoted shows the weakness: a tendency to over-pack the language with static present-participles (”rolling, tumbling, boiling, chasing”) and other descriptors, all of which points to a (perfectly understandable) too-muchness that results in long, rambling poems. I like to think of Giuliano going on to discover poets making experiments with voice and persona, like Pessoa, maybe, and poets working to condense their poems, like Niedecker, and really doing some interesting things with the tools he already possessed.

Then again, seduced in part by the “dead author effect,” I like to think of him exactly as I found him. Yes, he’s a flawed and not fully developed poet. But he’s also refreshingly free of coterie politics and poetic disputes, such as the one currently festering here, between Raymond McDaniels and Abe Louise Young. Or here. Or here. He’s just out there, passionate and intense about poetry, reminding me why I’m interested in this crazy little art in the first place.

Yesterday afternoon, Stephen McLaughlin stopped by on his epic cross-country journey in order to interview me for Jacket 2. He’s interviewing as many poets as he can in Buffalo, Detroit, Chicago … then he’s on his way to San Francisco, before swinging down to Austin, probably with lots of stops in between. He asked me to read some poems — which I wasn’t really prepared to do, as most of our books and things are already packed in preparation for the move — so I hastily pulled up the new version of Spleen that I’m compiling, and later he asked me to read a few of the Translations From Creeley, which I’d slipped in with the latest Kadar Koli in a package for him. Mostly, we talked about poetry.

Afterwards, we stepped outside and he took my picture in the backyard, which felt odd, since we’ll be leaving this house in just a few days. Then I drove him down to the Elmwood area where he was going to meet with Aaron Lowinger. I appreciated his carving some time out to talk with me on a very hot, humid day. And I look forward to the podcasts, and listening to all the other poets he’s planning to talk with.

However… I imagine this happens frequently when one’s interviewed about something… After we were done, I couldn’t stop thinking about awkward responses I’d given to fairly straightforward questions, and mulling over what I should have said. I mean, overall, I think I did fine. Last night, though, tossing and turning, I kept circling round to one question that I wish I had thought a little more about before answering.

It was something like, “So, are you concerned about ‘moving things forward’ with your poetry?” (If Stephen actually used a phrase like “moving things forward,” there were definitely quotes around it, and it came out of a discussion we’d been having about different kinds of poetry and poetry projects. So it was a pretty aware and contextual question, not something he had on a checklist.) And it’s not like I bungled it. I said, “No.” And then I said, “Poetry is going to move forward with or without me, it doesn’t need me for that.” And then I talked about things I’m interested in recovering in and for poetry, like the work I’m doing on Jack Spicer as a medievalist, and the medieval in general in relation to modern poetry.

But naturally, I thought about this some more, and I realized I could have been even more forceful than that. I could have said–I would be exaggerating somewhat, but not that much–that I’m actually against the idea of progress in poetry, the whole teleological, progressive narrative that runs alongside it. The idea that things have to keep being new, and the corollary implication that newer is better.

I thought about Bruce Andrews‘ talk from Orono, 2008, in which he says

For an adventure like so-called Language Writing, emerging in the 1970s, restless with the limits of the New American Poetry, this offers a crucial extra lineage to negotiate.* Not as an incitement to go further, beyond meaning … since the ‘zero degree’ had already been surveyed. But to take inspiration from these extreme (even desperate) radicalisms & yet to go forward to the heart of language, with its distinctive modes of signifying & making sense.

*He’s talking here about an “alternative” lineage for Language Writing, which includes Dada, Fluxus, Happenings, etc., aside from its more traditional roots in Pound, Olson, etc.

Andrews visited our class at UB with Steve McCaffery in Fall 2008 to give this talk again. To understand how patronizing it seemed, you have to imagine the follow-up questions, in which Andrews essentially explained that Language Writing had already done as much as could be done in terms of breaking new ground. The job for poets now is to essentially “back track” to whatever innovations might not have been fully explored by previous movements. Always keeping in mind that “the zero degree had already been surveyed.” For as much as Language / Postmodern writing has tried to break out of traditional, linear, “masculinist” modes of thinking, I’m struck by the Indiana Jones / Joseph Conrad image of poetry that’s offered here — wherein the poet is cast as an explorer, trying to cut new paths to the “heart of language.”

I don’t buy it. To my ear, it simply reproduces the language of capitalism, the language of technology, with its endless demand for newer and better, bigger and faster. (Almost, at times, it’s even the language of war; this is from the end of the talk: “Once we go beyond a totalizing assault on the environmental basics of language…” [emphasis mine]). I’m much more interested in the poet who quietly works on some very small problem in poetry, with little or no regard for how new or innovative the result of that experiment is. I like Jack Spicer’s notion of tradition — don’t have the book in front of me, so can’t quote it except from memory — as being many different poets all working on the same issues from different places and different times. That seems to be a more generous and less “progressive” model. Gaining and losing, he writes; but never really gaining or losing anything.

I find Louis Zukofsky to be a quite modern, even postmodern poet. But I find Lorine Niedecker (pictured, top) to be a much more interesting poet. And it’s hard to put my finger on why, exactly, but it seems to be related to these questions. There’s Zukofsky, grinding away in NYC, corresponding with Pound, whipping the Objectivist movement together, fragmenting, modernizing… While Niedecker toils in obscurity in Wisconsin, working at distilling her Surrealist tendencies into something rural and rhythmical, condensing, smoothing… It’s not just the contrast in life narratives that appeals to me — I simply feel more of a sense of timelessness when I pick up Niedecker’s work. And I find myself turning to it with much greater frequency.

You walk into a used bookstore. You head for the poetry section. You begin scanning the shelves, running your finger along the spines to make sure you don’t miss a slim, potentially rare and valuable small-press edition (in San Francisco I used to find Lew Welch chaps — Courses, Wobbly Rock, etc. — with some frequency). Nine times out of ten — scratch that, 99 times out of 100 — you’re disappointed to find a cheaply made book by Martin Michelwitz or some other author you’ve never heard of, on a press you’ve never heard of, which has somehow made its way into this store.

NOW… I realize this flies right in the face of my championing of scarcity, obscurity, etc., just in the past few weeks. And truth be told, I HAVE picked up, read, and even brought home books that I’ve discovered this way. I’ll have to write a post on some of those gems later on. But let’s face it: for every potential diamond in the rough, there are a dozen vanity projects that have rightfully been swallowed into obscurity, or there are “table scrap” poems by known or semi-known poets that are pushed out in cheap, crappy editions. There’s nothing more disappointing, even disheartening somehow, than wondering why someone thought it was necessary to publish Heartsongs by Louise Glück in a chap format (I made this up, but it sounds like something that might have been done, right?).

I was thinking exactly this sort of thing last evening as Tina and I wandered into The Second Reader Bookshop on Hertel Ave. Certainly, I had no intention of buying anything. But then, I came across some pretty remarkable stuff (see below). The books by Rilke are both beautifully bound German editions, which will hopefully motivate me to work on my language skills so I can actually read them properly.

Requiem, Rilke

Title page

The Duino Elegies

1931 edition from Insel-Verlag, Rilke's publisher through most of his life

I had to grab these. The Duino Elegies… Is there a better opening line in all of poetry?

Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel
Ordnungen?

* * *

The Frank O’Hara book was something I’d never seen before.

From Grey Fox in Bolinas; ed. Don Allen; 1977

It’s filled with interesting stuff — lots of rhymed poetry from the 1940s, and some journal entries in which he’s trying to work out his aesthetic stance, typically tongue in cheek. From 10/17/48:

Shakespeare wrote with a remarkable lack of taste. Both Byron and Shelley wrote to be patronized by their inferiors. I loathe Henry Miller most, next to myself, and Marcel Proust most next to us.

From 10/25/48:

This confusion! My own writing is so far in the future that it may well be a mirage. Except that the future itself is a mirage and I refuse to disbelieve in either.

Great stuff, and we had a great conversation with John Rigney, the owner, as he closed up shop on a perfect evening. We’ll definitely be back…

The story begins when Grimes was a down-and-out writer grinding away at part-time jobs while working on his fiction. He decided to apply to a few writing programs, and “got only rejections.” Then:

A telephone call from Conroy changed his life. “I never call anyone,” Conroy told him, “but I’ve read your manuscript.” Within a few months Mr. Grimes was teaching alongside Conroy in Iowa. To the envy and dismay of other writers at the prestigious workshop, he became the “golden boy,” the one who could do no wrong in Conroy’s eyes.

I can relate to this. Back-dating from the temporal clues in the article, it would appear that Grimes was around 30, if not slightly older, when he received this call. My own story about deciding to apply to MFA programs is similar, if not nearly so dramatic. I was living in San Francisco. I’d been studying privately with master poets, going to readings, beginning to publish a bit, running a small press, generally doing my best to break into the scene in a modest way. It seemed that the time for further formal education had passed, for me.

But, working two jobs and auditing a graduate poetry course, I grew frustrated with my inability to keep up with the reading. I realized that to truly learn the things I wanted to learn, not just about poetry but literature and language, I would have to devote myself much more fully. And the best way to do that, it seemed, was to apply to MFA programs. I’d be poor, I’d be a student again at 30+, but if I received a good offer, I could learn the things I wanted to learn, as well as have the opportunity to teach, without going too deep in hock.

I still remember the day Tom Grimes called me to offer a very generous fellowship at Texas State. It was the day before Easter. I took the call in the hallway of my apartment in San Francisco. The offer came rather late in the game, and I had already verbally agreed to a deal at another school. But in the end, it was a no-brainer. I could move back to the Austin area and be near friends, I could live cheaply, I would have time to study and write, without having to take out a loan. Paradise. A miracle, especially at my age (I was 34 at the time). I quickly backed out of my prior acceptance, and within a few months I was on my way back to Texas.

There, the similarities with Tom’s story end. I was never the “golden boy.” There were no offers to set me up with an agent in New York. I doubt this would have been the situation in any case — the entire MFA program enterprise has changed drastically since the 1980s; there are so many more of them, and so many more students, and at any rate Texas State is not Iowa. But the biggest difference of all, of course, is that I’m a poet and Tom writes fiction. And at Texas State, as at most programs, never the twain shall meet. So Tom welcomed me to the program and our paths crossed from time to time, but by and large I was indexed with the poets, and poetry does not operate on the scale of fiction when it comes to the literary marketplace.

And thank god for that.

Consider the following: Tom Grimes directs a successful writing program in a beautiful part of the country. He has published five books, which have been blurbed by substantial authors such as Thom Jones, T. C. Boyle, and Denis Johnson, and reviewed by big-time publications like the NY Times and Washington Post. By most measures — certainly by any measure in the world of poetry — Tom is a huge success as a writer.

Yet, according to the Times, his is a “cautionary tale.” His first novel, brought out by Little, Brown, was negatively reviewed, did not sell, did not make it to paperback. Tom himself labels it a “failure.” He had trouble selling the next one. After that he began to “crack up,” and it was only through his ongoing friendship with Conroy, as well as, presumably, the efforts of his wife, friends, and his own intestinal fortitude, that he picked himself up and eventually kept going.

There are lots of conclusions one could draw from this story, but in the context of things I’ve been thinking and writing about recently, I’d like to stick to the literary marketplace and the idea of exposure and success.

In terms of the marketplace, Tom is a failure. He’s not a bestselling author. He’s not a household name. He’s not someone who commands a guest spot on Oprah. He’s not a writer whose books appear in “best of the decade” or “best of the century” lists.

But as I argue above, in other respects, he is an unqualified success. If he were a poet, again, he would have achieved about all it’s possible to achieve in the professional realm. (There are no NY Times bestsellers in poetry; no guest spots on Oprah; no “best of” lists.)

So I do take it as a cautionary tale, but in a somewhat different way: Be careful how you measure success for yourself. Be careful how you allow success to be measured for you. Forge your own path. Forget the marketplace. It’s sure to forget you.

The quote above is from Rilke. I’ve been thinking of him a lot the past week or so as the “contest” debate has unfolded. Rilke, of course, had a knack for drawing support from various quarters, and was never terribly shy about asking for patronage in the form of money, lodging, even help for his estranged wife and support for his daughter with her. He never hesitated to use his name and the mystique surrounding him as a poet, even as he felt terribly ambivalent about fame — hated it, really — and cultivated solitude to an extreme that’s seldom been approached since.

Was it wrong for him to play it both ways? Did he use people? Was he disingenuous? Even ruthless?

Probably. But I also think he was smart. He traded on fame to secure solitude — the time and space to work — in the process securing an outlet and legacy for his poetry. In the end he might have done a little too good a job of the latter; the name Rilke has almost come to be a synonym for quotable tidbits of poetic advice (Letters to a Young Poet, etc.) and/or the heightened sensitivity of late German Romanticism. In other words, he’s reducible, in much the same way I argue in my introduction to the Big Bridge feature on Diane di Prima that she’s reducible, wrongly so, because of her early association with the Beats.

Which brings us back round to the question of scarcity vs. exposure. There are tons of good reasons to want to make sure your poetry gets out there. The most basic of these is that you owe it to the work itself, on some level — Sylvia Plath said something about too many unpublished poems on the desk starting to stink — it’s a measure of respect for the effort and time you’ve put in to get the words in circulation, enter into conversations and discourses, let it go into the world.

Farid Matuk, in one of the comments below, writes

Sometimes contest-driven presses are about distributing work to a larger number of people. And sometimes, among those hacks and bores and middle-brow folks who can’t be bothered to get to know great presses like Effing and Punch Press and Skanky Possum and Interbirth there are also some poor kids who are incredibly excited to just be reading literature on the floor of a suburban Barnes & Noble and who are ready to be turned on to more challenging work.

This is the highest good of all — one that I think everyone from Rilke to di Prima to most of us concerned with poetry today could agree on — the idea that maximum exposure for good poetry maximizes the odds that, via the mass culture that necessarily mediates so much of our experience, some young reader will chance upon a poem by Poet A or B that will blow that reader’s mind and draw him or her into the world of poetry, perhaps a particular world of poetry that will lead to a deeper engagement with the world through art.

To frame the question this way is turn it around somewhat — last post I was writing about presses, now I’m writing about individual poets. But the question thus framed becomes: To what extent is it right (proper? responsible? appropriate?) for a poet to seek a wide audience (exposure)? If Poet A prefers to write poems specifically for and towards certain people, actual people he knows and poets from previous generations with whom he finds himself in deep engagement through affinity and close reading, and maintains thereby a more or less conscious level of scarcity about his work, deliberately withholding it from wider circulation, is that a good or bad or preferable etc. thing? OR if Poet B tirelessly promotes himself, relentlessly queries editors with an endless stream of manuscripts, and, once published, relentlessly cajoles critics into reviewing his work, and overall makes sure that he keeps himself in the public eye via blogs, readings, etc., is that a good thing or a justifiable thing given that it helps make the work more available to a wider set of eyes?

Major cop-out: I have no answer. Worse: I think I would fall somewhere in the middle, a happy medium that probably isn’t too happy at all, for me or my work. To close, just some brief thoughts on my own particular relationship to poetry in terms of this question.

–In my experience as a reader, poets who trumpet themselves too loudly tend to become parodies of themselves — in some subtle and indefinable way I find myself taking them less seriously somehow

–As an editor and again as a reader, I find that “name” poets sending stuff for easy pub. in journals tend to repeat themselves and their prior successes, and I wonder if even they know anymore whether what they’re writing is any good

–I do have “bitter poet syndrome”–I do lie awake at night wondering if any editor will ever ask for a poem of mine again, the way a ballplayer trying to break into the bigs wonders if he’ll ever get a crack at the major leagues

–I do feel that the few times publishers have been generous enough to produce a book of mine, it’s my responsibility to get the word out, do readings, otherwise promote the book, so that the good folks running the press can approach the break-even point

–More and more, I find that I feel no responsibility to anyone outside of the ’scarce’ circle with which I’m directly in contact

–Perhaps this is “magical thinking,” but I feel that the work itself will find its way into the hands of the person who needs to read it, with no (or little) help from me

–I think that this question of author-reader and wide vs. select audience is terribly complex and important as one sets forth as a writer, and far too little is thought about it

–I deeply respect the work of Kent Johnson, e.g., for tirelessly critiquing things like audience and ‘the author function,’ etc.

–In much the same way that I used to show up for a slam-type open mike series in San Francisco many years ago and read my poems in a relatively quiet, measured voice, my instinct is to pull back, go against the grain, stay relatively low to the ground

–It’s impossible to completely separate any of this out from ego, and probably you shouldn’t even try — just find a way of riding out that storm that works for you and does justice to the work

–I still find that the most interesting / valuable books I come across start out as secrets, word-of-mouth, sub rosa

–Because poetry is such a cloistered art, it’s possible to maintain a level of scarcity / local / subculture that I don’t think is really feasible with music or other kinds of art

–At the same time, the proliferation of blogs, online communities, virtual word-of-mouth makes it increasingly likely that the anonymous reader will find his or her way to innovative, underground work

–I do feel a responsibility as a poet to critique the means of book production and distribution vis-a-vis capitalism, mass culture, and so on

–I have deep admiration and respect for all my friends in the poetry world, and i cheer with genuine enthusiasm every time one of them publishes a new book, or wins something, or gets mentioned in a review

–Having said that, I don’t think it’s out of line to respectfully challenge the choices of other poets with regards to these questions, nor to be challenged and questioned in return