On Publishing
On Publishing
There was recently a panel discussion held on Publishing and the Poet at Naropa University. This is what I would have said if I was invited.
Publishing is a constant goal of any writer. For an unpublished author, the desire is often a substitute for something else—a desire to be “good enough” or to be something like the people we admire. What publishing teaches us is that none of this happens—or that when any of it does, it only seems to bring new and different problems. The writer who wants to be “good enough,” suddenly finds that they’ve alienated the very people they most want to impress—their peers, their reviewers, even their families, or maybe no-one notices at all. In any event, your new book will almost immediately become your “old book.”
There is only one book that’s really important, and that’s your first book. When someone finds out that you’re a poet, their first question is always, “Do you have any books published?” The first time you can answer “yes” to the question changes everything. But then, concurrently, all of the problems noted above begin. But it’s much better to be working on this level of difficulty than the “no I haven’t published a book of poetry, no I’m not a ‘real’ poet” level. For that reason I want to acknowledge all of those publishers who have published people’s first books, dramatically changing their lives (Joe Richey published my first book).
As far as goals go, publishing a lot of books is a particularly shallow one. I will guarantee you that when you’re gasping your last breath, a quick look at the bookshelf will not really help. In fact, you may wish you had spent all of that time and energy on other things, things not so singular, less goal-directed, more fun.
So why write and publish at all? Why not just stop writing and spend all of your time enjoying what little time you have left? Well, that’s the Catch-22. Writers write because that’s what they do—they have no choice—they can’t not do it. It is as if whatever isn’t written down may as well have never happened. I’m always surprised at the amount of detail I find in my journals as opposed to the dearth of memories in my brain. In this way, my writing documents and preserves my life and thoughts and feelings. Publishing doesn’t really matter because I’m not writing for others—I’m writing for myself.
But publishing is very important to the writer for at least one reason. I remember Diane di Prima telling the story of how she had gotten ill and didn’t know why until she saw a row of binders with her unpublished writing stuck on a shelf. She realized that by ignoring her creative work, she had thrust a sword right into her own heart.
Practically, publishing is a good thing because it gets things off your desk so you can make room for whatever’s next. It’s always better to write something new than labor on something increasingly remote, work written years ago. Who cares? Use that energy to write something new instead.
Once you begin publishing, it becomes a craft, like any other. The process of refining a collection of poems into a book becomes a conscious part of your writing practice and teaches you how to write a book of poems, or it at least helps you to realize when you have written one—you know what a book of poems is. A book of poems is when something larger than an individual event is captured as it is lived—meaning as it exists, changing through time—which is as much a surprise to the poet as everyone else. Where the last poem in the book could not have been envisioned by the poet who wrote the first poem in the book, but couldn’t have been written by anyone else.
Part of this is also about the process of reading your work “in print.” A poem always looks different—more solid—when set in type. Plus, reading your published work also helps you better understand your own aesthetics, how you “read.” And, if you forget who you are, or who you were, well, there you are!
I know there’s a certain stigma to self-publishing, but self-publishing has had the greatest effect on my writing. I love being published by others (it’s quite an honor), but I get more pleasure out of publishing my own books.
Writing any book is hard work, and writing a good book is particularly difficult. But reading a book is also difficult, and there’s not a lot of time for it. When you’re putting your book together you should be thinking along the lines of “What do I offer the reader—what’s my Return on Investment? Why should they be willing to spend their time reading my book? What do I give my readers more than just expressing myself? Plus, there’s a lot of competition—how do you argue that a night is not better spent reading John Donne, Emily Dickinson, or Walt Whitman?
Well, one thing you can do is to learn something, and then teach it to someone else, perhaps a different way of seeing the world or revealing something new in the everyday world. Sometimes that seems to me to be the poet’s most important task because it’s pointing out something that your reader can begin to see in their own world.
But the only way I’ve known how to get to the place of having something to say is to write (and discard) every possible bad poem until I work my way to the place where better poems are written. Pound once said that the only absolute necessity of the good poet is a very large garbage can. If you write irregularly, you’ll hold onto your poems, even if you’d be better off throwing them away and making room for something new. If you’re writing regularly and you have a pile of work on your desk, it’s easy to see that three of them are real poems, and the rest of them are not. The best advice I was ever given about writing came from Ted Berrigan: Put your writing away in a drawer and don’t read it until you’ve forgotten writing it at all.
But with age I find a certain transparency in great poetry—the poet is perhaps the narrator or the reader’s Virgil, but they are concerned not with showing off but in telling the reader something, something important, something that they have to tell us. And with that insistence the poet disappears and all we see is the vision of what it is they’re trying to communicate. And in this process of disappearing the poet is able to clearly enumerate the “it” of it, without referencing it to himself, so that the reader will feel the spark arc not through the poet but from one terminal to another, without interference.
So the final task of the poet is to make themselves transparent. When the art is generated at that level, it’s not so important whether the work gets published or not. It is important, for all the above-stated reasons, but it is the attainment—the assured reality—of the moments themselves, and what was earned through attention and effort—that changes everything that comes in contact with the poet. And by being able to capture a specific awareness in words, a poet can communicate that awareness to others who will recognize that awareness in themselves as well, or who will see the world as the poet did for the length of the poem. This type of poem does not create or destroy anything, but it can reflect something of the essence of what it can be to be alive, and in that finds its true value.
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