2 of 4
The title of your most recent book is Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet. Are the qualities of ambition and survival particular to the experience of certain poets like yourself, or are they more universal and inherent to the process of becoming a poet?
When I was young all I wanted was to be a great poet, and I went at it with an indefatigable fury. I thought that this ambition was "pure," insofar as I knew that being published by the best magazines and presses and praised by the best critics wouldn't ever answer this need. The only judgment that truly mattered was that of the great, dead poets I most admired, and they were unlikely to speak.
Now I'm not so sure. (About the purity of the ambition, I mean; the dead still aren't saying a word about my work, though I do occasionally hear a disturbing kind of skeletal chuckling.) All ambition has begun to have the reek of disease to me, the relentless smell of the self. We want to stamp our existence upon existence, our nature upon nature. We are pursuing a ghost—even my image of the dead participates in this—rather than a god.
And that is the issue, at least for me. I do think a life in poetry is a calling, but for a long time I was unwilling to admit that the call might come from God. And if he is the one calling, then he is the only one who can ratify your response.
Which is to say: my thinking on this has evolved over the years. I don't regret or renounce my early ideas—I do think a poet's ambition ought to be aimed higher than any sort of worldly success—but clearly, since I myself have often been confused, I can't claim to speak for all poets!
I was startled recently to learn about Josef Stalin's secret poetic career. In a letter to a friend, Stalin explains why he gave it up: "I lost interest in writing poetry because it requires one's entire attention—a hell of a lot of patience." Stalin's words were fresh in my mind when I read this at the beginning of your book: "I still believe that a life in poetry demands absolutely everything." Obviously the people and circumstances couldn't be more different, but this only emphasizes the central idea here. What does it mean for poetry to demand "absolutely everything"?
Stalin makes you think of me? I'm trying to feel flattered.
A life in poetry does have a high cost, and not simply because this country doesn't value the activity (though this doesn't help). If you have that particular fire in your head (to paraphrase Yeats), it's going to play practical havoc with your life. It's going to require a lot of the emotional energy that you might be giving to other people, it's going to afflict you at odd and unpredictable times, and it's going to afford no compensation except for the sweet relief you feel when, as a poem finds its form, that fire goes out. What a relief that is, though, and how close to the very center of being itself you can feel at that moment.
But it's worth finishing the sentence you quote above. What I say in the book is, "I still believe that a life in poetry demands absolutely everything—including, it has turned out for me, the belief that a life in poetry demands absolutely everything." Which is to say that the very belief that poetry somehow costs everything, which can become its own kind of comfortable deprivation ("I can't give myself over to this relationship/cause/belief because I have to give myself to my art"), might be part of the cost and have to be renounced or moved beyond. Certainly this has been the case for me.
share this page
RSS Feed
