Near the end of my 25-year marriage to poetry, a friend jokingly called my books “stocking stuffers.” That was when I stopped questioning what I could do to make poetry more relevant and entertaining and began questioning why I had devoted myself to it in the first place.
What about poetry had absorbed me so completely? I rarely read it. I wasn’t compelled to decipher the recondite verses of Ashbery, Creeley, Berryman, Duncan, Rexroth, Levertov, Olson, etc. Some of them were alive when I took up the quill and I personally met them. But I can’t say that any living poet inspired me to versify. In my time, as T.S. Eliot said of his time, there were no big literary figures to emulate or even rob. And there were no masters to mentor me.
I started writing poetry in the mid-eighties and stopped in the mid-aughts. From start to finish, I wrote in solitude, with no readership but the few who read the zines and small-press journals in which I published my work. There was no cultural movement to make poetry more relevant than any other esoteric hobby. Yet I persisted. Why? Because, embarrassing as it is to admit, I was gullible.
The driving factors of my gullibility were wishful thinking and the Dunning-Kruger effect. Due to my incompetence, I wanted to believe that I was more competent than I was. It was a sort of mental hamster wheel of confidence driven by ignorance. To put it simply, I was confident that I could be a poet because I didn’t know that I couldn’t be a poet.
Some of my confidence was due to my environment and upbringing. Early in life, I’d been told that I had talent. First by my parents, who, based on my facility at churning out the occasional doggerel, convinced me that I could achieve the impossible. The next enablers were my teachers, who told me that I had a gift for assonance, consonance, vague verisimilitude, odd imagery and the accidental truth. I believed them, of course, because it always feels great to be told you have a gift, even for something ridiculous. It didn’t occur to me at the time that my teachers were hobbyhorse poets themselves and, like most amateurs and addicts, wanted company.
Had my situation been more typical, had some authority figure been honest and realistic and advised me to go into science, medicine or law, I might have taken the advice. When James M. McCain’s mother, a trained opera singer, saw her son pursuing a career as a singer, she told him that he hadn’t the talent, voice or face to succeed. She was, however, supportive of his writing, recognizing that were he to diligently apply himself, he could at least make a living at it.
My parents were born in the nineteen-forties, had kids in the sixties and seventies and raised them in West Marin County. It was just after the Vietnam War and Watergate, a time when anti-authoritarianism and exotic spirituality united to liberate all forms of self-expression from the tyranny of common sense. It was the era of God’s eyes in the trees, Born Free, the tambourine, improvisational dance, patchouli oil, self-help and the magical thinking that if you did whatever you loved the money would happen, like shit sometimes does.
Despite the fact that the only money that ever happened to me was by way of a series of low-wage, itinerant jobs, I desperately wanted that pop superstition to be true. So I diligently applied myself to what I loved and waited for the money to happen. It didn’t, because what I loved was poetry.
One of the most profound things I learned from my pointless struggle to be a poet for twenty years, driven by solitary perfectionism and publishing in small magazines and literary journals, was that if you need money and are doing something that doesn’t make money, you should cut bait and do something that does. Which, hate it or not, is usually a job.
But I found it difficult to kick years of habitual effort, bohemianism and hope. Especially when all I saw were artists who had succeeded. I saw celebrities who had done what they loved and reaped the rewards. I saw the smiling, happy and ever-so-grateful musicians, writers, actors and painters, bowing obsequiously to adoring fans and graciously thanking their generous patrons, grantors, producers and publishers. I followed the example of those successful artists, who were always chanting, “Hold on tight to your dreams.”
In the arts, as in politics, success is visible and failure is not. You could even say that success is a function of visibility. That is why a book that no one would otherwise read becomes a bestseller when Obama publicly mentions that he read it. That is why the failures are as plentiful as seeds that never take root. And who knows exactly why a certain seed out of millions did take root? We only see one plant grow. We don’t know how or why sixty-three million potential plants didn’t grow.
In the United States, there are 225 MFA programs listed in the Poets & Writers database. Each of those programs accepts an average of 12 students per year. That’s 2,700 students per year going for a master’s degree in creative writing. The acceptance rate of those MFA programs ranges between 1% and 6%. Taking a median acceptance rate of 4.5%, the number of students who apply but aren’t accepted to MFA programs is around 60,000 (2,700/4.5%) per year. Assuming that these rejected writers also hoped to pursue a writing career, adding them to the accepted writers (62,700) and multiplying that by two decades (20), which is the time I spent trying to be the next Ezra Pound, we get 1,254,000 wannabe writers. Subtracting from the wannabe writers those who get published (<1%), we are left with 1,241,460 unpublished, once-hopeful, failed writers living in total obscurity and regretting that they ever landed on the creative writing flytrap.
If early on I’d bothered to consider that there are a million and a quarter unknown, unseen and unsung failures in the creative writing world, I might not have wasted those twenty years trying to thrive in that world. I might have used the time to learn to write for a salary, or to have become a scientist, doctor or lawyer. I might have heeded the words of Samuel Johnson: “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.” (Note where he put the comma.) I should have realized that it’s harder to make a living on poetry than it is to beget a child by random ejaculation in the Desolation Wilderness.
Even the history of poetry should have told me that poetry was not a viable career. A century ago, when poetry rejected comedy, drama, storytelling and song; took a vow of chastity and cloistered itself in the academy; it shunned vulgarity and lost all chances of popularity. No matter what magical thinking, positive denial or blind enthusiasm drove my interest in the “dead art,” I should have realized that very few people can tolerate the stuff. That modern poetry’s figurative gymnastics are not appreciated outside the gymnasium.
I’m not saying that a poet can’t live by poetry as a sideline, with the real bread and butter coming from grants, awards, fellowships, workshops, teaching, residencies, editorships and poetry-related jobs. I’m just saying that no one earns a salary for practicing the art of making simple things inaccessible. If someone insists on perplexing all but the cogniscenti, I suggest they go about it the way Emily Dickinson did: live in the upstairs bedroom, use poetry to explore the vast, eternal here and now, and let a few folks know that your books are in the trunk by the bed, bound with string.
Before poetry was enshrined in books, there was a guy with a lyre who sang old stories to the King and his court. They’d summon him to the banquet hall and have him belt out a few stanzas of the Iliad. Then they’d fall asleep or accidentally impregnate a servant. Poetry was a way to light up an otherwise dim and boring night. But after the middle ages, it migrated to print, the domain of the literary elite.
Most poets today are moral, artistic and intellectual. This is not to say that popular, entertaining, low-brow poets like Charles Bukowski can’t exist. It’s just to say that they exist as outliers and tend to rib and ridicule the above-mentioned moral, artistic and intellectual poets. Here’s an example:
Poetry Readings
poetry readings have to be some of the saddest
damned things ever,
the gathering of the clansmen and clanladies,
week after week, month after month, year
after year,
getting old together,
reading on to tiny gatherings,
still hoping their genius will be
discovered,
making tapes together, discs together,
sweating for applause
they read basically to and for
each other,
they can’t find a New York publisher
or one
within miles,
but they read on and on
in the poetry holes of America,
never daunted,
never considering the possibility that
their talent might be
thin, almost invisible,
they read on and on
before their mothers, their sisters, their husbands,
their wives, their friends, the other poets
and the handful of idiots who have wandered
in
from nowhere.
I am ashamed for them,
I am ashamed that they have to bolster each other,
I am ashamed for their lisping egos,
their lack of guts.
if these are our creators,
please, please give me something else:
a drunken plumber at a bowling alley,
a prelim boy in a four rounder,
a jock guiding his horse through along the
rail,
a bartender on last call,
a waitress pouring me a coffee,
a drunk sleeping in a deserted doorway,
a dog munching a dry bone,
an elephant’s fart in a circus tent,
a 6 p.m. freeway crush,
the mailman telling a dirty joke
anything
anything
but
these.
—Charles Bukowski
Marcus Valerius Martialis, or Martial, the first-century, Celtic-Iberian poet, also trolled and satirized his fellow Romans ruthlessly, is another of these renegades:
7.46 To Priscus
Wanting to adorn your gift with verse, Priscus,
endeavoring to speak more eloquently
than the mouth of Homer ever did,
you make me wait and torture us both
with a muse that has nothing to say
that concerns me. Save your poetry
and lofty prosody for the rich and
give the poor something of substance.
—Martial (my translation)
Both Bukowski and Martial entertain their readers with a combination of transgression and low-brow satire. As did François Villon, Pietro Arentino, Geoffrey Chaucer and Lord Byron. They were entertaining and accessible and, unlike most poets, wrote for an audience. They did it for fun and renown in their own lifetime.
1.1 To the Reader
You’re reading him now, the man you want,
Martial, known the world over
for his droll books of epigrams,
the poet to whom, studious reader,
you afford such honors in life
as few enjoy in their graves.
—Martial (my translation)
Writers in other genres have no trouble entertaining an audience. They have no qualms about making people laugh, cry or cringe. Some make the claim that they do it for their own amusement, with no regard for others. But if they amuse themselves and others are amused as a result, then they know how to entertain. That is what poetry, in all its serious intent, must do if it intends to compete with the other media that now light up our otherwise dim and boring nights.