- Make your ego porous. Will is of little importance, complaining is nothing, fame is nothing. Openness, patience, receptivity, solitude is everything.
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most basic of these is that you owe it to the work itself, on some level — Sylvia Plath said something about too many unpublished poems on the desk starting to stink — it’s a measure of respect for the effort and time you’ve put in to get the words in circulation, enter into conversations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
