Alison Croggon wrote:

>My adventures in commercial publishing tell me that publishers still seem to
>think that writing is a gentlemanly pursuit, practised by those who have a
>private income and for whom the income from books is pocket money or
>something...it drives me crazy.  The problem is that writing is a vocation
>that requires such investment of time and being to follow truly, and nearly
>all that investment will be placed under the rubric of "love" ("but of
>course, you do it for love").
>
There is very little I do "for love" anymore.  I started writing at age 
46 from sheer compulsion and desperation, and that is what keeps me 
coming back to it long after the illusions of being on Terri Gross's 
interview show "Fresh Air" have departed like this morning's methane 
moment.  I really used to think of poets as aetherial creatures who 
acted like Percy Dovetonsils in Ernie Kovacs TV sketches.  It's not that 
I don't care, believe me: Fame really IS the spur and self-delusion is 
its hidden offspring.  There's always the conflict--I hate saying 
"tension" because it's so dead a word, but it's true all the same.  I 
live with the desire for recognition, for being good enough to be 
recognized (like quality is the defining factor!), for the socko book, 
the Pulitzer, the readings, undergraduate women and faculty wives, and 
teaching appointments--all this mental chaff goes directly to war 
against what I call the Realistic part of me, the idea that I know only 
too well by now where even hard work, regardless of field, gets you.  I 
even resist being called "poet" because it sets off thoughts I'd rather 
not have but know damned well I'm going to have.  I resisted en-titling 
33 years ago when Robert Kroetsch publicly "accused" me of being a 
poet--at a memorial reading for Pound, no less!--and I resist it now.  
In some way I judge poetic "success" and the right to be called a poet 
by output: how many books ya got out there, suckah?  How many times you 
been to Yaddo?  How many MFA programs do you teach at?  Mine's bigger 
than yours, and besides, I've got six of 'em to better handle the 
undergraduate women.

My illusions about the wonderful world of bigtime publishing took a 
header when in early 2001 I talked to my first cousin who is (was?--she 
may have retired) a top-dog fiction editor at Penguin/Putnam in New 
York.  She is without a doubt the most bitter person I know after my own 
mother.  Well, she's my late mother's niece.  Does the business of 
writer-handling turn you into Oscar the Grouch's baby sister or does it 
just help to be that way up front?

I have made my own living since 1966.  Sometimes it consisted of 
University stipends, sometimes of salaries, too often of Unemployment 
Insurance benefits.  Once the writing started in 1990, the job of the 
moment was essential.  It required work only 3 days of the month and I 
learned how to write poetry in the 27 days of the month I did absolutely 
nothing.  In other words, I wrote poetry on an AT&T grant.  Even today, 
I steal from those Homeland Security bandits who employ me now for all 
they're worth because the daylight work hours are when I am most awake, 
and because the demands of a salaried position and a unstable manager 
really do act at times like the sand inside the oyster.  I may not 
produce pearls, but it's better than dealing 24x7 with swine.

I have no reason to question Alison's claim that publishing thinks of 
writing as somehow for and by the Leisure Class.  There are centuries of 
proof that this insane attitude is...well, insane.  James Merrill was 
one of the lucky ones, though I don't know how much his homosexuality 
had to do with him being invited to avoid the family business.  I think 
Hawthorne also had the wherewithal to live off family money while he 
wrote.  And let us not the most famous of all, William Seward Burroughs, 
who I suspect was paid about two hundred bucks a month just so he would 
not come home:-).

Ken

-- 
Kenneth Wolman                        http://kenwolman.blogspot.com
--------------------------------------
"Poetry is tribal not material....this is where you can remember the good
times along with the worst; where you are not allowed to forget the worst,
else you cannot be healed."--C. D. Wright



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