Dear X.,

Believe you me, I feel everything you say about being anxious to "get started." It is called ambition, and that's perfectly fine. The flip-side of the coin is life is what happens while you live it, and all this will drive anyone absolutely batty if this comparison-shopping of writerly careers gets to your head.

There's always going to be people you perceive as getting all the breaks or people you get more breaks than; even typing out that sentence makes it sound absurd. There is the quote from Updike, I think, that goes "I die a little every time my friends succeed."

I want to tell you how clueless I was when I was young without sounding paternalistic, about graduate school when I was your age now, writing poems about my dad, imitating Philip Levine and Sharon Olds, then Wallace Stevens and John Ashbery. I want to say all that dreck about apprenticeship. But back then, I didn't think it was an apprenticeship; I wanted to get going right away, whatever the getting-going was.

Needless to say, it didn't happen. My first book came out nine years later, when I was 34. And it wasn't even the one I'd been tirelessly arranging and rearranging, sending out to the Joseph Blow University Press Prizes. I probably had quit writing poems 3 or 4 times between 26 and 34: from 26-30 because I was too caught up in nothing happening, from 30-34 because I was married and thought, deep down, this was a completely adolescent and selfish enterprise. And I was still smarting from not being in any kind of crowd or coterie, which I blamed on myself--I was convinced that, because I was this aesthetic fence-straddler who didn't have the guts to become fully indoctrinated in any school, I would forever be without a posse. It all seems so high school, and it still is.

The more I thought about not writing and really giving it up, though, the more I missed it--the more the actual, you know, pleasure from writing poems became clear to me. The real breakthrough was going away to VCCA and sitting at a desk in a farmhouse, having been encouraged that someone, anyone, would want to help me write poems. I was forcing the question, by which I mean I was seeing if I could write the poems I meant to write and mean to write. And I wrote so much for those three weeks I was exhausted. No hang-ups, no SASEs, no Dustbooks directory (yeah, I was old school), no Word files with journal addresses, no looking at the Best American editions to look at birth years and fretting that I wasn't where I should be.

Instead: ass in chair. I was just writing poems, and taking pleasure in it. There's no other way of putting it: Everything else is bullshit. And it still is. Now that I've had some good things happen, guess what? Sometimes it feels just as hard to handle good things as the lack of it. Being called 'vaingloriously pompous' in the New York Times can add levity to any good situation. Then something like American Book Review comes out, and I'm riding that good wave now. But both things go away. What's left is the work.

Last week, three SASEs came back--those microscopically small pieces of paper bearing rejections--put in, no doubt, by people I wish would look at my poems with more care, the care I think they deserve. Some days those light envelopes make me feel terrible because I had a good day up until then, and wouldn't it have been better if I had gotten an acceptance before having supper? Other times, it might be an acceptance, and I'm no happier or less miserable than I was the day before.

What I'm saying, what I hope this all adds up to, is that doing all this writing stuff is a real confidence game, but confidence does nothing to help one write the poems. The second that happens, I think, you're writing ad copy. Or the process is somehow tainted.

Granted, I know some poets who look at the journals, read the poems, and then say, "I am going to write a poem like that and get into that journal." And you know what? They do get in that journal! What do we do or say to those people--do we curse them in the public square, string them up? Say we hate them? Maybe. I know I have or wanted to many times. Who is to say that that process has less integrity than my own?

Or how about poets who, for whatever reasons, do have good breaks, or what we see as good breaks, a book come out when they are 23, who in turn get big prizes and grants? Are these poets better than us? Maybe.

But as Tomaz Salamun once told me, "that's for the cultural theorists to decide."

D

Labels: Riffs