Just finished a draft of a forty-page poem. Doin’ great. I think I’ll take a nap or something.
Summer’s on its way
…but naturally, my wardrobe has yet to adjust to new circumstances (I’m wearing a jacket today, for God’s sake!). Having said that, though, some news on the poetry front. As far as my own stuff goes, there was a gratifyingly positive review of my book in the latest Iota, which almost, temporarily makes up for the fact that last year’s roll where the magazines are concerned has not continued this year. Oh, some acceptances here and there, but…
Enough! It’s the same damn story as always.
As far as shitty readings go, on the other hand, there was a launch of a neighborhood literary ‘zine at a bar about four blocks from where I live, and I figured, “How bad can it be?” I’ll confess to drifting out the back about a third of the way in, but let’s just say that a bunch of lineated prose written by bicurious hipsters about their sexual identities isn’t quite my thing. I’m not by any means saying that there’s anything wrong with being bicurious, though there probably is something wrong with being a hipster, but the experience was less confessional than that moment when you sneak a peak at your sister’s diary and realize that she really isn’t up to all that much after all. And they had the microphone right near the door, so with the other hipsters in attendance, slipping out the door was simply impossible. And I had stuff to do the next day, so I couldn’t even deal with being trapped in the worst reading I’ve seen in ages by getting roaring drunk. So I headed to the back patio and got mildly tipsy. Which just wasn’t enough.
I couldn’t help but wonder, though, why such magazines exist. The “publisher” was enlightening in that regard. He was one of those guys who takes a bunch of workshops and wants to be a writer but… never seems to write anything, and, in order to get himself and his friends to write, started a magazine. Unfortunately, however groovy the life of a New York writer might seem, sometimes the lack of inspiration itself is telling you something, that not everyone should write, and if you aren’t feeling the inspiration to do so, trust your instincts.
Well, as this blog isn’t exactly dead, I thought it might be a good idea to check in. After all, I’ve been in New York since August, and you, dear reader(s?) might be vaguely wondering what’s going on with yours truly. On the poetry front…
In one sense, quite a bit is going on. The Raintown lacks only a couple of reviews coming in to get to the printer, and the submissions come in every day. Or at least most days. It’s never quite even. But it does generate a fair bit of work.
My book, Across the Grid of Streets, continues to sell at a trickle. There’s a review in the latest Iota over in Britain that I haven’t read yet. But at least it’s notice, eh?
The thing I anticipated happening more when I came back that hasn’t so much in actual fact would be, well, the readings. I went to a ton of the things in August of 2008. I got to know the underwhelming beer list at the KGB Bar reasonably well, darkened the door of the Bowery Poetry Club a couple of times, spoke briefly to David Lehman once, and generally…
Got bored shitless. The more established poets were, in the main, the generally competent purveyors of McPoetry that you would expect. Okay. Whoopedydoo. Par for the course. And some, to be fair, were actually good. But many of the “younger” poets (which seems to generally mean thirtysomethings like me) running around New York are wankers.
Harsh? Yes. Undeserved? Christ, no!
Let’s assume that a certain degree of callowness and self-centeredness are acceptable vices in the thirtysomething poet. Indeed, from a certain point of view, they aren’t vices at all. One could even argue that these are fairly general characteristics of artsy-fartsy types, but that such words get bandied at the relative young’uns for reasons of lack of gray hair or whatever. Fine. But that’s not really what I’m talking about.
The more “experimental” poets I heard on those late summer evenings fell into two camps. In the first camp were those whose pieces read like class notes from a graduate seminar on Baudrillard or some such. Which might be interesting if you’ve read a bit of linguistic-turn theory but not that much of it. And while I found this a bit dull and flat and bloodless and prosy, it was the other lot who really bugged me.
We’ll call this bunch the overaged stoner bunch (whether they indulge or not). When one is a teenager and into books and writing and so on, one will almost inevitably have that one friend (or maybe several) who will ring one up at some point in a lather of excitement, barking, “Man, you gotta check this out dude! Can you believe I wrote this while tripping balls ON ACID?” And as one looks around in horror to make sure that the parents didn’t hear that last bit (which was yelled), one’s friend launches into it. And it is generally a bunch of pseudo-surrealist vaguely word-associational bullcrap that probably made perfect sense at the time of writing but that sounds, well, like the ravings of a sixteen-year-old ON ACID twenty-four to forty-eight hours later. One does one’s best to say something nice before making an excuse to get off the phone.
Of course, for the sixteen-year-old kid on acid, this is done rather ingenuously. He or she (though usually he) has no grand theories about semiotics or rupturing the linearity of Western thought or what have you. And when you get someone twice that teenager’s age reading something that sounds remarkably similar, you hope to Christ that there is such a theory operating and that you’re not just listening to the psychotropic effusions of a thirty-two-year-old acid-head. Because it would just be too pathetic without a bit of dodgy theory behind it.
As for the mainstreamers (though most younger poets at New York readings tend to like a bit of a patina of “experimentalism” in their work), well, it’s the same old McPoem stuff that’s been boring the hell out of us for thirty years. Just in a bit more of a freewrite form.
And I should note that I’m not talking about the open mic scene here, where things can get far worse… but, in patches, much better, too. I’m talking about the periodic readings by “emerging” writers, frequently under the auspices, directly or indirectly, of the New School or NYU (the Gog and Magog of the New York City literary scene). And yes, perhaps, in a dozen or so readings, I just got unlucky, but the crapola was sufficiently general that aside from an occasional feature of my own and periodic forays to various open mics, I’ve kept a relatively low profile.
Where the hell I’ve been…
Well, in the first place. 4-4 teaching loads take up a great deal of time. In the second place, though, I’ve recently been made the associate editor of the Raintown Review under Anna Evans, who’s one of those annoyingly omicompetent people who can edit a print journal (the Raintown) and an online journal (the Barefoot Muse) and sit on two editorial boards besides that and still get her kids to gymnastics on time. But I’m not quite that omnicompetent. Something had to give, and between work and a few reviews commissioned elsewhere, this blog was the bit that gave.
I’m not giving it up, mind you, but it may, in the future, be more a matter of directing the reader to where my stuff is rather than a depository for said stuff in its own right.
QRL
A Review of Time Gentlemen, Please, by Kevin Higgins
When I moved to Galway, Ireland in the summer of 2007 from Dublin, I was informed, by various characters in varying states of sobriety, that the man I should seek out was Kevin Higgins, who, with his wife, Susan Millar DuMars, runs the successful Over the Edge series in Galway. And those folks in Dublin were right. Kevin was one of those guys one wants to know–he and Susan are supportive of local talent without a hint of parochialism and have (along with others, to be sure) done much to make Galway an exciting place to be a poet.
But what does this have to do with Time Gentlemen, Please (Salmon, 2008), Kevin Higgins’s second book? Well, in one sense, relatively little. There are plenty of examples of founders of influential writing groups and important reading series who… well… can’t write for squat. Likewise, there are plenty of very good poets who just can’t seem to get along with the human race at large. The skills required to be an advocate for poetry–its public presence in a given place–are somewhat distinct from the ability to write well. But it certainly doesn’t hurt either skill set if one has both. And Higgins, to his credit, is a good poet as well as being a good organizer and advocate.
Time Gentlemen, Please is, fundamentally, a book about growing older. Sure, there are plenty of those, but what sets Higgins’s work apart is a sense of changing perception of where one stands in relation to history. And much of this flows from his own background on the Trotskyist left as an ex-member of the Militant Tendency. Though there have been plenty of poets with a Marxist background (myself included), I cannot recall a collection that addresses the actual experience of being a left-wing political activist quite so directly. In “My Militant Tendency”, Higgins describes himself as a youth in the early 1980s, flush with revolutionary fervor:
“Instead of masturbation, I find socialism.
While others dream of businessmen bleeding
in basements; I promise to abolish double-chemistry class
the minute I become Commissar…”
But the disillusionment sets in as time goes on. In “The World Socialist Party of Honeysuckle Heights” a branch meeting is “[l]ess the vanguard/of the proletariat, than a dinner party/that kept not happening”, and the protagonist in “The Cause” degenerates from “the campaigner” to “the mad fucker with the sign”.
These poems capture that sense one can get manning a literature table at a demonstration, of being somehow adjacent to history but really not shaping it. Whether it be the late British Trotskyist leader Ted Grant poring over the newspapers while drinking endless cups of tea (”Death of a Revolutionary: Ted Grant”), or the narrator imagining that the guy running a B & B in rural Ireland “is ex-Romanian army” (”The Great Escape”) the poems are haunted by a sense of broad social forces at work, and Higgins’s evolving attitude toward them.
Coupled with the retreat of great ambitions on the political front is a parallel recognition of the difficulties the personal lives of those around him. In particular, Higgins’s father, described in “Family Dispute” as “the sad man in the caravan/who keeps coming back/at me in poems” is a repeated presence. Just as history can be uncooperative with Marxist theory, likewise the life of an individual is revealed as unconducive to more modest five-year plans.
This should by no means imply grandiosity or stultifying solemnity, though. Higgins’s work is leavened by an ability to laugh, not only at the shortcomings of the world around him, but at himself. “Living Proof”, dedicated to his wife, captures this:
“The poet, who this time twenty years ago was busy
failing English in the Leaving Cert, waits
at the end of the aisle for the woman,
who by dinner time will be his
new American wife; remembers
on this best June day, the night
he boarded the bus at the end of a previous life,
where he was just a throwaway remark
in a kebab shop on West Green Road; living proof
that if you keep not trying eventually
it won’t happen. This best June day.
The sun extravagant, the music starting to play…”
And Higgins, to his credit, may have disavowed some of the ideas of that young messer of a revolutionary on his winding path to the aisle, but he still clearly likes and sympathizes with his former self, and he always stops short of an endorsement of the status quo. Though no longer a revolutionary, he remains a rebel.
On occasion, the book does wobble a bit. One of the problems with having a sense of humor as a poet is that it can lead to a comic rather than poetic closure. Higgins generally avoids this, using the comic to bolster serious points with a great deal of verbal ingenuity. But in a few poems, such as “Keyser Soze Does Not Frighten Me”, one senses the presence of a borscht-belt comedian in the white space of the right-hand margin whispering, “Take my wife–please!” But such moments are rare, and even if they don’t quite match up with the general incisiveness of the book, they do remain funny.
Time Gentlemen, Please is not only a good collection, but it establishes Higgins as a writer who is not only doing something no one else is doing, but who is doing it well and getting away with it. And we should be glad he is.
The Allusion and the Canonical
To add a bit to the recent discussion between Rose and myself… Given that this is a literary blog, certain truths we may hold to be self-evident. Most of us read a lot. Most of us read a lot of literature. Most of us read a lot of literature by authors who were born before 1900. The same can be said if I specify 1800, 1700, etc. That is, we are, relative to the general run of humanity, a pretty canon-savvy bunch. We can rattle off a few lines of Shakespeare, know the name of Petrarch’s unrequited love, and so forth.
But the point really isn’t how smart everyone is (you’re welcome, though). No, it’s that American formalists often don’t show much imagination when interacting with the great works of imagination from the past. As T. S. Eliot put it in “The Sacred Wood,” “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.” Too often, when reading the formalist journals, one feels the need to add something to the “bad poets” norm, the “unimaginative poets”–or, to be a bit more precise, the unimaginative poem. That is to say, the frequent “update” poem, in which, say, the Furies become rather stereotypically shallow and vindictive mall rats mocking the (poet-surrogate at a younger age) four-eyed narrator, is probably a bad poem, draining the Furies of their terror while the remaining mythical residue around them prevents the story being told to resonate in its own right. But then there’s the unimaginative poem, where the myth is not complicated or really explored, save for filling what the Spinal Tap album cover sleeve refers to as a “much-needed void.” If you’re Tom Stoppard, you can look at Hamlet from the point of view of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, even as they remain very much Stoppard’s characters. but do we need a sonnet to tell us what Ophelia was thinking, when Shakespeare does a damn fine job of it himself?
The canon, in contemporary metrical poetry, is far too often simply inert, with authors appreciated, myths revered or burlesquely bowdlerized, and blah, blah, blah. Boring. One lacks a sense of the dialectic of allusion, the way in which, done properly, the past and present communicate with one another, the way that Agamemnon comments on the tawdriness of Sweeney’s dinner companions, how Athenian history is harnessed to Mauberley’s lament about the devolution of modern life, the way Shakespeare hovers around Berryman. We need to be more subtle with this stuff, more imaginative than we are now. Far too often, the canon is used as a substitute for the actual alchemy of inspiration.
God(dess) Talk–My Response
First off, if I go on about the Goddesses more than their male counterparts, it is because I just tend to see more of Persephone than Hephaestus in poems nowadays. But him, too.
Secondly, I am by no means saying that mythological material is inappropriate, nor direct engagement with authors of earlier eras. And I thought the myths were cool when I was a kid. I still do. It’s just that… with very few exceptions, the poems I see retelling them are terrible. It’s not that they’re obscure. It’s that they’re bad canon poem crap that makes one long for the source material fiercely. And it’s not the fault of the myths. Because they can be used brilliantly in contemporary poetry. Eliot’s “Sweeney Among the Nightingales” is a fantastic example of this. Dig:
APENECK SWEENEY spreads his knees
Letting his arms hang down to laugh,
The zebra stripes along his jaw
Swelling to maculate giraffe.
The circles of the stormy moon
Slide westward toward the River Plate,
Death and the Raven drift above
And Sweeney guards the hornèd gate.
Gloomy Orion and the Dog
Are veiled; and hushed the shrunken seas;
The person in the Spanish cape
Tries to sit on Sweeney’s knees
Slips and pulls the table cloth
Overturns a coffee-cup,
Reorganised upon the floor
She yawns and draws a stocking up;
The silent man in mocha brown
Sprawls at the window-sill and gapes;
The waiter brings in oranges
Bananas figs and hothouse grapes;
The silent vertebrate in brown
Contracts and concentrates, withdraws;
Rachel née Rabinovitch
Tears at the grapes with murderous paws;
She and the lady in the cape
Are suspect, thought to be in league;
Therefore the man with heavy eyes
Declines the gambit, shows fatigue,
Leaves the room and reappears
Outside the window, leaning in,
Branches of wistaria
Circumscribe a golden grin;
The host with someone indistinct
Converses at the door apart,
The nightingales are singing near
The Convent of the Sacred Heart,
And sang within the bloody wood
When Agamemnon cried aloud,
And let their liquid siftings fall
To stain the stiff dishonoured shroud.
That last quatrain just sends the poem into a whole different level. I have read this poem so many times that I should be bored with it, but am not. Agamemnon’s death becomes an ironic comment on what came before, and… well, there’s plenty of criticism already.
What gets me about the way most contemporary formalist poems dealing with Greco-Roman myth is this–it’s not their use of Classical themes, but that they come across, generally, either as rather pale homages to cracking source material or, worse, as something that someone wrote down when he/she had no ideas of his/her own. And the pieces are flat, unrevealing, and just dull as hell, in contradistinction to the source material. There are, naturally, exceptions, but it is my general impression.
But, by God, I hope I did not give the impression that I dislike the use of mythological source material per se or poems set in other historical eras or the like. Such is not the case, and, to my recollection, has never been the case. And you’re misreading me a bit more broadly, Rose. I do not propose what I do as a template for anyone else, and a fair bit of my work, indeed, is implicitly set in the Oklahoman, yes, suburb where I grew up. The comments you are thinking of (presumably from the Evans review) were a reference to the lifestyle of a given poet rather than to a particular subject of poetry. And they were, moreover, semi-jocular, a bit of a jab at a sort of Baudelairean notion of what “the Poet” should be like.
Hope this clarifies a few things.
God(dess) Talk–Rose Kelleher Weighs In
First, a bit from Rose Kelleher:
A response to Quincy’s constant ranting about Greek goddesses
First of all, a question: do the Greek gods piss you off as much as the goddesses do? Elsewhere you’ve even mentioned their diaphanous robes. What about horsehair-crested helmets?
Those Greek goddesses were pretty tough gals, for the most part. I’d be especially wary of badmouthing Athena if I were you.
Seriously, though, I used to grumble about classical allusions, but I had the excuse that I wasn’t familiar with them. I was a slacker in high school, then went to UMass Boston, which is (or was, at that time) just a notch above “Batshit Community College” — the college you use in “Selling Your Book” as an example of the kind we-poets-in-the-know did not attend. I mention this because, for a change, it’s actually a qualification to say what I’m about to say. If A. E. Stallings were to say it, she’d undoubtedly say it better, but you could dismiss her as a scholar who’s out of touch with the common folk. I, on the other hand, may be weird, but I’m still common.
The myths are not some secret handshake for Ivy Leaguers. They’re out there on Wikipedia for anyone to read. After a few years of grumbling, one day I decided to see what all the fuss was about, and bought a book: “Classical Mythology” (Oxford Univ. Press). The book is nice to have because everything’s all together, and there are lots of pictures.
What really did it for me, though, was reading the Iliad. I had been assigned to read a few chapters of it in high school, and hated it. It was probably a bad translation (the Fagles translation is the one I enjoyed) but mostly I just wasn’t ready then. I think you have to have lived a little to appreciate Homer: lost a few loved ones, been in love, been dumped, been married and divorced once or twice, been to a strange country, been poor, been well off, been poor again, been conceited, been taken down a peg, seen a few really bad car wrecks, and seen men go off to war, beautiful men who, at your age, look awfully, awfully young.
After that it was the Odyssey – which, believe it or not, I didn’t like as much as the Iliad, though everyone’s always saying the opposite. Monsters are nice and all, but what really killed me were scenes like the one where Hector says goodbye to his wife and baby before going off to fight, and the baby starts crying because he doesn’t recognize his father in that big scary helmet, so Hector takes it off. Whew. Ouch. Way to humanize a character before you kill him off! Or the way Homer would write a paragraph about each soldier — a hunter, a shipwright, a priest — telling us how skilled the man was at his trade, how brave he was in battle, giving us a little of his family history, making him seem real to us, just before telling us exactly how he was killed:
“The famous spearman struck behind his skull, just at the neck-cord, the razor spear slicing straight up through the jaws, cutting away the tongue– he sank in the dust, teeth clenching the cold bronze.”
That’s much more real and immediate than those high-school-yearbook-style photo layouts you see in the Washington Post, where they tell you the soldier’s name, age, and rank, and nothing more. When a soldier is killed in Iraq, who appreciates his suffering? Or take that scene where Achilles finds out Patroclus is dead, and he’s so overcome with grief that he ends up rolling around on the ground, bawling his eyes out and rubbing dirt on his face. Wow. There’s nothing esoteric about this stuff. On the contrary, it’s way more visceral than the detached, oblique poetry you read in magazines today. Love, loss, grief, jealousy, vengeance. Maybe people today don’t roll around on the ground bawling their eyes out; maybe we should. God knows we’ve all wanted to at some point. These are timeless scenes that anyone can identify with.
After re-discovering Homer I re-discovered Euripedes, and Sophocles, and the Aeneid… that’s as far as I’ve gotten. The point is, these “2,000-year-old stories” you’re so quick to dismiss are not so far removed from our lives, if you look past the particulars. (And you’re a poet, Quincy, you should be able to do that!) They’re like contemporary stories, but submerged in a pool. All you have to do is look down through the water. There are some ripples, and some weeds waving around that get in the way, but at the bottom you can see your own life. Everybody’s life. It’s all in there.
In fact, the ripples and the weeds may make it clearer, in a way. When a poet like Stallings, for example, uses a Greek myth, the fact that the emotions are able to come through, despite the antiquity of the story, calls attention to the timelessness and universality of what’s underneath. Using an ancient myth can help you go straight to the heart of things. Don’t get me wrong, it’s great that you write poems that are firmly grounded in contemporary urban life. But if it’s true, as you seem to be saying, that readers can only relate to poetry that’s set in their own time and place, then your own poetry is irrelevant to anyone who lives in the suburbs or the country or even a different city from you, or anyone who reads your poetry twenty years from now. If we can’t look past the superficial trappings off culture and idiom, then we might as well just screw poetry altogether and watch TV.
Finally, it is my firm conviction that a poet should write about whatever he or she is moved to write about. You may think writing about Greek goddesses makes for bad poetry. But what could be worse than selfconsciously trying to be hip and contemporary? Is that what poetry is all about – a high school popularity contest? Can you imagine the bad poetry that would result if we all started competing to see who’s the most tapped in to popular culture? Think of the cringingly embarrassing poems you’ve read by aging nerds who tried to use slang that didn’t come naturally? Think of the exploitative poems you’ve read by well-to-do, highly-educated poets who’ve thoughtlessly used other people’s poverty or misfortune just so they could score another poem, and stick another feather in their cap.
It’s far better for those of us who are nerds to accept, even embrace, our nerdiness. I say be true to yourself, and write about Greek goddesses if that’s what moves you to write, and write about Petrarch and Laura if you want to (I personally find Petrarch rather hot, the way he was so obsessed with Laura and never stopped loving her even though she didn’t love him; remember, just as breasts can be a turnon for men, fidelity can be a turnon for women) and if some people don’t like that, well, they don’t have to read it. In fact, most of what’s available, not just in poetry, but TV, movies, novels, etc., caters to people who don’t give a damn about Homer or Petrarch – so for those who do, why begrudge them their little crumb? You don’t have to like it, but you don’t have to eradicate it from the face of the earth, either. Live and let live.
Erica Dawson’s Big-Eyed Afraid
I wanted to like this book more than I do. Let me explain that. Erica Dawson’s Big-Eyed Afraid (Waywiser, 2007) should be precisely the sort of collection that would reinvigorate American metrical poetry that, with the gone but not forgotten Formalist in the background, has become–with some important exceptions–white, polite, often rather conservative, and inhabited by too many poems where Greek Goddesses discuss Petrarch’s unrequited love for Laura. She has absolute scads of talent, a different swing to her metrics than any other contemporary metrical poet I have encountered, and evidence of a clearly fruitful engagement with that strange beast called “performance poetry”. In short, there is more energy here than in the vast majority of collections–metrical or free verse–one encounters. Take the opening of “Chocolate Thunder”
I was born, Mom says, dancer-
Physiqued, lean leg or arm, or, hand
For five down low, born You the Manned,
Go Girled, and Dad’s wrong Answer
To dead ball dreams. I tore
Shit up, handled the no-look pass
And a jig. Somebody slap my ass.
Now who’s your daddy? Score.
There’s an exuberance one doesn’t see very often… unless you know where to look. And therein lies, I think, one of the great strengths–and weaknesses–of Big-Eyed Afraid. Dawson is drawing on a stream of poetry generally unknown to many “formalist” poets, mostly because they can’t be bothered to go to a few open mics in an urban area in the United States. Dawson’s skill with the demotic, at times crossed with the highly literate reference, as well as her narrators frequently calling attention to their sexiness, backgrounds, and racial history, would not be unfamiliar to aficionados of “performance poetry”. Likewise, many of her tricks in rhyming, notably her frequent rhymes in the middle of a word, would not be terribly out of place.
And so far so good. But too often, the point of Dawson’s poems is that the narrator (who seems to resemble Dawson herself as a general rule), never really gets beyond talking about herself, whether in church as a kid or in the midst of an orgasm as an adult. And while most readers would give up a kidney to have as good a body image as an Erica Dawson poem, the effect, for all the verbal ingenuity of the work, becomes a bit monotonous. While this is, I suppose, “empowering”, with the self being discovered and accepted and loved and all that, by the time the reader hits page 98, he or she is ready for something else. Not Greek Goddesses recapitulating 2,000-year-old stories, necessarily, but maybe something about someone other than her.
But for all of the collection’s self-absorption, it’s good that it exists–and hopefully, it will resonate among the “formalist” audience who constitute much of Waywiser’s American audience. While Dawson does tend to go myopic, the object of study is sensual and vibrant, and her influences from more than one stream of American poetry should be instructive. While Big-Eyed Afraid does not entirely deliver on its potential, its author, in subsequent work, may well do so.
Selling Your Book
One hears, with some regularity, about how poets would sell an assload of books if they just got off their asses and went out there to move a few tens of thousands of copies. Now, one does not hear this from publishers, nor from the general public. Sadly, it is poets themselves who entertain such notions–maybe not to quite this extent, and often in inverse proportion to the amount of stuff they’ve gotten into print. But still. As this is a literary blog, I shall assume that most of the readers of this essay are, in fact, poets, so, I will address this to you.
No science was involved in the writing of this essay; nor was there any systematic process of interviews. No, this is based on firm anecdotal evidence, told to me by various poets in various stages of sobriety over the course of several years, as well as my own experiences. If you get a book deal you’ll be in for something like what I’m about to describe.
Among many poets, there seems to be the idea that if the right work is selected, the accolades and public recognition will come. Bullshit. Unless you’ve got a full-time publicist (and most small presses don’t have one of those, let alone individual poets), it’s a slog. Have a new book out? Get on the radio. Not the top forty station, mind you. The local programming show they run at 10 AM on a Sunday morning on that local station that plays all those godawful pop songs from the 1980s during the week. Someone’s listening, sure. Not a whole mess of people. Maybe one or two will buy your book after hearing you read some pieces on the air. Maybe not. Possibly even probably not. Though they may swing by the local independent bookstore where you dropped off some copies of your book and sort of remember hearing you on the radio and maybe buy a copy. Maybe. In a few cases.
Or you can get yourself booked into a reading as a feature. And they may ask you to do it again. Maybe. A year-and-a-half-from now, because it’s a monthly reading and the venue owner likes to have them booked well in advance. And a few people will probably buy a copy of your book. Well, maybe they will. And if you’re at a reading whose host has some connections, and you hit it off really well, he or she might suggest your name to the local literary festival. Though not for the main slot. They’re flying over Carol Ann Duffy for that, because people have heard of her. No, you’re reading with five other people on Sunday afternoon, a bit after the radio show you appeared on five months before airs. And two of your fellow readers liked your book enough to offer to swap. And perhaps a nice young woman (or nice young man, depending on your gender/sexual orientation) in the audience likes your reading, too, and she (or he, depending on your gender/sexual orientation) might buy the book, and there’s even an outside chance of getting laid, but you’re still talking low sales. (Of the books you swapped, you read the first third of one when you come down with a cold three weeks later, and two years on, you’ll be “meaning to get around to” the other one.) And possibly, someone a bit higher up the food chain, possibly even Ms. Duffy herself, will wander in. Could happen. She’ll tell you she liked your reading and ask you your name, but she was only able to change a ten-pound note in Heathrow and only has a dollar left from the cab ride and can’t buy the book, and besides, she really has to talk to the organizers about something.
And you might even get a review in a prestigious journal. The journal has a subscription base of 2,500 people, of whom 200 subscribed because they’d heard the thing was highbrow but give it a desultory look-over. Five subscribed online while high. Another 250 are shipped out to university libraries. Some 600 are subscriptions from former and would-be contributors largely looking to see what work of theirs might be appropriate to send in, given what’s been running lately. Thirty subscribers graduated from the same creative writing program as the editor, while another ten are undergraduate chums. Then there are the thirty or so contributors of poems, fiction, and critical articles. The reviewer of your book won’t buy a copy; she has the review copy. The editor might, except that the magazine reviews sixteen or so books of poetry a year, and he knows five of those under review, who take priority. Most of the poets look at the issue to check for typos. Ditto the fiction writers. Of the seven contributors who read the review, one buys the book reviewed immediately after yours; two decide that your book doesn’t sound like their thing at all, four think they may well buy the book some day, and one actually buys it when you’re booked for a double-feature together nine months later. The subscribers, of the 400 who make it to the review in the back of the magazine, skim the review as a rule, noting the kind of poetry it is. Of these 156 decide they might be interested, and 16 actually buy it (out of the 27 who decided they should), one of whom because he lives in the same town as your publisher’s second cousin, who owns a bookstore and actually has your book on the shelf.
The launch went well, though, with ten area poets showing up, as well as your sister-in-law who happened to be in town on business. Then there were the seven people who made it from your place of work, as well as fifteen or so people you know socially. You gave away a copy of the book to a local novelist of your acquaintance who launched the book, of course. As well as two representatives from your publisher. Of the 38 people who showed, a whopping twenty bought books, while five others pleaded poverty and said they’d get back to you–and one of them even does.
Announcements on Eratosphere, Sonnet Central, the Gazebo, the Critical Poet, PFFA, Poet & Critic, and Dr. Whup-Ass’s Bitch-Ass Poetry Round-Up net you eighty-six messages of congratulation–and about twenty actual sales. Of course, some of that is because on the Sphere, that fuckwit Cantor posts that message about Rhina Espaillat reading somewhere or another in Toronto, and everyone piles on to congratulate her (even though no one congratulating her lives anywhere near Toronto or plans to go there for her reading), and then some newbie trying to get to fifteen posts by whatever means necessary posts a “Wish I could of made it” message on a month-old Carmine Metrics reading announcement, and within two hours of posting, the goddamn thing is halfway down the page with no responses and two hits, which were you checking for typos and Tim Murphy trying to click on the Rhina link but opening your announcement by accident instead, and you have to bump it back up yourself. Which is embarrassing.
And then, of course, there’s the university reading. Which doesn’t take place in the swank old college downtown, where you went some years ago and a couple members of faculty vaguely remember you. No, you’ve got a friend on the English Faculty of Batshit Community College, an upgraded technical school, half of whose students speak Lithuanian as their first language. But it’s a reading, and you haven’t done very many readings recently—which is why you’ve only sold one book over the past month, and that to an ex-girlfriend (or ex-boyfriend, depending on your gender/sexual orientation) who found you on MySpace when she searched for old flames a few days after she found her husband schtupping her younger sister (switch around pronouns and nouns according to gender/sexual orientation). Though you don’t know about that last bit.
At any rate, the night of the reading arrives, and it’s the first poetry reading ever held at Batshit Community College. So the dean is there, and your friend and two other members of the English faculty are there (the fourth member is at his daughter’s school play), and five students show up. Because your friend has offered his remedial English class (of 45) extra credit for turning up. So you do the reading and ask if there are any questions. There are. Or is. A student asks you why you use so many big words. You say you aren’t sure. The students are poor, as are the faculty, so no one buys a book, though you give one to the dean as a goodwill gesture. Your reading is the last poetry reading ever held at Batshit Community College.
There are, of course, book store readings, generally booked at one of the shrinking number of independent book stores in your area. Most of your friends can’t make it because it’s in the middle of the day, and they have work. Which is fair enough, really. But as you read to an initial crowd of five, some folks do stop and listen. You might sell three or four books.
As for open mikes, they are frequent in the bigger cities… but showing up at an open mike is, to a great degree, self-promotion on the part of each reader—which is to say the overwhelming majority of the audience.. And there’s nothing wrong with that per se. But the role of the featured reader (you) is significantly de-emphasized. And as a consequence, the book may sell a few copies if you’re a regular, but don’t expect masses of sales. There may well be none. Open mikes aren’t designed to sell books.
And then, of course, there are the poetry conferences. So, you spend a crapload of money to get to West Chester, Pennsylvania for the big do. You get your books placed in the bookstore… and are promptly astounded by how many fellow poets of your acquaintance have books and chapbooks. You spend your allotted $50 in one day and from there, swap four or five books with folks who heard you have a new book out (though it’s been nearly a year now). Maybe four sell in the book store.
The point is not to give up hope, but to realize what you’re in for early rather than late, and, perhaps, to be a little less scornful of seemingly low sales among one’s peers. This is not the kind of market that produces blockbusters. Poetry can sell, and indeed does, but the process is generally incremental, if often rewarding.
