The Forest for the Trees

Writing. Why do I do it?

This semester, for the thesis course, we've been discussing something I'd already assumed but was nevertheless discouraged to hear confirmed: the world of "serious" literature these days, especially poetry, is all about who you know. "Incestuous" was the word used.

It's about where you get your degree, what writer's conferences you frequent, who you schmooze with, who takes a liking to you. In short, an introvert's nightmare.

Sure, when it was all theoretical, the idea of doing readings and interviews and meeting a few people seemed par for the course, but is that really all it's about?

Can you truly not get published without knowing the right people and pulling the right strings? That notion is intolerable to me. It's just not who I am. My thoughts stray to Emily Dickinson, until I remember, She was never published in her lifetime. I want to be published in my lifetime. (There's still debate in some circles as to whether an online venue "counts," even if it involves wider readership.) But, that question aside, I'm no Emily Dickinson, either, and don't hope to be.

I read something this week that certainly did nothing to boost my confidence as a fledgling in the poetry world. A former instructor from the program I'm finishing this semester (very former, and very eager to kiss-and-tell, so to speak) wrote a piece in a respected literary journal about her experience in our program, and spoke very unflatteringly of what I pieced together was almost certainly the class I had taken with her.

It was a sardonic piece in which the author took the ax she had to grind and used it to bludgeon, in my opinion, the trust and confidence of her former students. I would say it verges closely on libel, with the program in question thinly veiled and easily Google-researched. She referred to the program as "ghetto" because it happens to be part-time and classes (in one of the two locations) are not held on the main campus. Sure, I've used the term jokingly myself, but here there was a mean-spirited, derisive air that discredited the whole existence of part-time programs, as if people who can't quit their jobs and take a teacher's assistant salary for a year just shouldn't bother, that we did it merely for vanity and were only trying to add another line to our pedestrian resumes in search of a teaching job, and that the other instructors in the program (people I profoundly respect) are simply humoring us and wasting their/our time.

I was not amused. In fact, I was pissed. Reading that article, after beginning with a genuine smile to see a familiar name on the byline, I felt slapped in the face, almost as if someone who might have lent a hand into the club (if that's the way it must be done) -- the tight little circle of the contemporary poetry scene -- was instead slamming a door in my face, saying I wasn't worthy. It felt a bit like being told, in the second grade, that I wasn't allowed on the jungle gym. Funny, since my precious feelings survived the course in question fairly well, and I even counted it a good class, all in all. I can take constructive criticism, and I'm sure it improved my poetry. But this was different. This was personal, and petty. I just hope, if I am ever in the position that the author finds herself in, (where she's quickly made herself cozy, as if she was never one of us) I will have a bit more grace.

So, back to that question: Why do I do it?
To be part of some scene? Hell, no.
To win the best prizes? Ditto.

For a while the other day, I was thinking, well, why, then, other than some delusion of grandeur or dislike for honest work?

Fortunately, I remembered why. It's that girl who wasn't welcome on the jungle gym at seven, now struggling through puberty, leafing through her eighth-grade lit textbook and, for an hour or so, forgetting herself, meeting people from other times and places and feeling that sort of human sympathy and kinship with them that neither death nor schoolyard disgrace can diminish.
Sitting at my desk then, in gratitude to those people I would never meet, I decided that one day I wanted to be the one extending a hand forward through the years and the continents, and I still want that.

So fuck the rest of it. I'll write, and if it all ends up in a desk drawer, and even if the house burns down, desk and all, it's been its own reward to me.
Because that's the other thing. It's just fun.