What do I think I am up to?
I do not know what I am up to, other than, perhaps, my neck in foolish moves, dubious decisions, squandered promise. A cursory examination of the files reveals the dismaying but indisputable fact that my accomplishment as a poet has been at best modest dating back at least to 2003. Each year since has yielded only a handful of keepers and not many more drafts that may yet be whipped into something of substance.
The blog Memo from the Fringes was launched Memorial Day weekend 2005. From there through the end of 2009, I posted 392* entries, not including the fictions Next Time We Talk and the unfinished Sketches from the Days and Nights of Charlotte Reine. Alas, quantity by no means implies quality. Too much was filler, gibberish, rant, invective, and drivel. Even so, it kept me busy and consumed a fair portion of my resources of time and talent, and I am vain enough to believe some of it justifies the expenditure.
A reasonable person might endeavor to polish and market the best of those essays in hope of generating income that might purchase a measure of freedom from the wage-work that would translate into more time to devote to this kind of work. I confess I am just not up to that task, which would in all likelihood be Sisyphean in nature anyway. The situation is as Dostoevsky found it when he wrote for money while trying to reestablish himself on the literary scene after his return from exile:
I don’t like it [the novella Uncle's Dream, for which he had received an advance], and it saddens me that I am forced to appear in public again so miserably…. You can’t write what you want to write, and you write something that you wouldn’t even want to think about if you didn’t need money…. Being a needy writer is a filthy trade. (quoted in Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time, Princeton University Press 2010, pp. 256, 257)
Were I a young man, I might make an effort to ply that filthy trade, albeit with no assurance that things would turn out more satisfactorily than they did with the course that led to where I now stand. While I am not so very old ― I like to think I can still lace up my ASICS and run whiskey-swilling, cigarette-puffing poet friends half my age into the ground (smiling as I type) ― it has been a while since I was young. My inclination from where I stand today is to devote what resources of time and talent lie at my disposal to the writing, undertaken in Camus’s terms as one of the few pure things in my life. I can hope that readers who find their way to this space will find something here of interest, as I hope that those who happen on my little writings when on occasion they appear in other publications will enjoy them.
The prickly issue is not whether to try to write for money but the extent to which the time, focus, and effort demanded by essays and forays into fiction comes at the expense of the same kind of time, focus, and effort demanded by poetry. I believe that my greater talent as a writer is as poet, not essayist, and certainly not novelist. But as Emerson put it, nothing is got for nothing. Have I made a trade-off these past five years? Is that trade-off one I want to continue to make? What I want, of course, is everything, to recultivate the poetry and see it bloom anew while penning essays, reviews, and maybe even fiction that I hope hits on something in some sense informative, entertaining, amusing, if nothing else by way of turning people on to some good books to read and good films to see. “You must go on. I can’t on. I’ll go on.” (Samuel Beckett). What else I’m gon’ do?
memo from the editorial desk
The next essay in the Brontë series remains in progress. I had thought that piece, focused on Charlotte and Jane Eyre, would close out the series until Ceylon Anderson, editor of Venetian Blind Drunk (which can be found at Powell’s Books), advised that I must read Anne, in particular The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, stating flat out that she is the best novelist among the three sisters. Thus, the Brontë project goes on.
*Oops. The figure given when this was first posted earlier today was 492. That seemed a lot for just over four-and-a-half years, and a recalculation proved it to be in error.
David :: Apr.12.2010 :: House Red: Literary and Intellectual :: 1 Comment »
Postscript: I did not intend to imply that all writing for money is a filthy trade. I can cite from my own experience an article I wrote about being a caregiver for someone with Alzheimer’s disease. After publication the subject thanked me and said she thought I got the story of her and her husband just right. For that alone that work was immensely satisfying.