Sometimes when I need to find a page quickly on my website and I don’t know where it is I’ll just google it. Like “Mary McCray NaPoWriMo.” It’s faster than browsing around for things. I learned this trick at ICANN because the site has tens of thousands of pages (full transparency, you know).
If I search my name on Bing, that search engine asks me very politely “are you sure you don’t mean porn star Marie McCray?”
If I search my name on Yahoo!, that engine just gives me results for porn star Marie McCray. (“Surely that’s what you want, right?”)
If I search my name on Google (and this is why Google is king, I guess), I get a handy information card to the right that actually returns Me. But Google has decided for some reason that I’m a Journalist. Which is very funny because I’ve never written a piece of professional journalism in my life, unless you count those old reviews on Ape Culture (which had the grand distinction of not being very good).
I can see now that I need to get new pictures. One of the things I dread doing (more on that below).
I have some good friends on the East Coast who I saw last August. They’re a couple: one is a writer/poet and the other is a musician. I’ve known them since back in the Sarah Lawrence days. We’ve had some great conversations over the years about being artists and I remember touring the lair of the musician last summer and the two of us got to musing about why we keep working even though we haven’t “succeeded” and how we would still keep doing it whether we were successful or not. Because we love the doing part and we probably couldn’t stop even if we tried.
I figure feeling this way helps us forego the constant assessments of our value. It’s more about what we value. But this doesn’t make it easy.
It’s tough out there. I know three graphic designers (web and print) who struggle to find work because the Internet has decimated their opportunities, just as it has for writers.
But often I have to remind myself that for poets, it’s been this way for about 100 years already. We were once on top of this culture heap, but then dime-store novels sent us packing; and then motion pictures arrived to soak up everyone’s leisure time. And then TV came. And then the computer games. And then the Internet.
And motion pictures were far from the first disruption to human kind. The printing press put those monks out of business, which was a shame because apparently they were drawing little hidden penises in everything).
Media change is relentless. And we find ourselves in the middle of yet another disruption because annoying human beings keep inventing things like stone tools.
But considering there are still thousands of poets writing and reading poetry even though it’s been 100 years of deeper and deeper losses, we must be working with a different rubric of success. But if you want to join the Irrelevant-Media club, you know where we are. We keep on like dysfunctional little windups.
Alternatively, I know two writers, (one of them lives in my house), who, if there’s no money or promise of money down the line, they do not write. Period.
Another close friend I spoke to recently works in a medium that I would consider mostly a labor of love. And for years they’ve been doing it just because they love doing it, they said. Recently, this changed to working for “something big,” a term that is a vestige of this person’s former life in Show Business.
It’s such a commonly ringing bell lately, I can’t help but think that, despite what anybody says, fame and money are what everybody wants.
Sometimes I even doubt myself. I mean even those monks wanted to be remembered by someone, otherwise they wouldn’t have been drawing all those funny little penises in all those old books.
I’ve been reading an essay about Robert Frost over the last few days, “Robert Frost and Tradition” by Siobhan Phillips.” Phillips says “Frost courted fame on the widest scale and became by some measures the most well-known English-language poet of the twentieth century.”
Frost said, “there is a kind of success called ‘of esteem’ and it butters no parsnips.”
And esteem buys you no butter, that’s for sure. You can’t argue with that.
I have another visual artist friend I’ve know a very long time, a very talented artist, but this person has what I would call a problem of self-motivation and over the decades hasn’t produced very much. Recently I had dinner with this person and they said apropos of nothing, “I really thought I would be famous by now.” I had some very unfriendly thoughts at that point and then when I got my sea legs again I said, “So how is Becky?”
I mean I have problems of my own but I have some self-awareness about it. For example, I also another friend who gives good advise about networking: go out and hob-knob with other poets (oy!), join poetry groups (no), give readings (good lord!), network through teaching (I’ve seen that and I consider it a Faustian bargain). I didn’t want to do any of that. And that’s on me. I like to think of it as a handshake with mediocrity.
I’m also been reading a poetry anthology sprinkled with rediscovered poets going back to the Colonial era, poets who never published in their lifetimes but are being uncovered even now like hidden treasures. And I think how nice that sounds to me sometimes. You get the fame if not the money and you don’t have to deal with any of the bullshit, like poetry grunts at public poetry readings. (Thank you to Ann who reminded me I sent her that poem many years ago and completely forgot about it.)
But I’ve been thinking more deeply right now about where this ambivalence around success comes from. And like most things, it probably resides in my early childhood experiences, particularly with bullies. I grew up in a place where you would be a target if you won or if you lost. So the safe spot was right in the middle. When I learned what grey rocking was I was like Yes! I am a master of grey rocking. I imagine a little black belt around my little inner grey rock. Literary grey rocking. It’s perfect.
Robert Frost also wrote a great deal about futility, from the futility of building a fence to the futility of conceiving a child (he lost three, arguably four). However, he saw no futility in poetry. He famously said, “every poem is a momentary stay against the confusion of the world.” And how does one monetize that?
I was writing something the other day and I referenced the game Mousetrap. I played this game with my friends Diana and Lillian when we were kids. We didn’t even bother playing the game. We just set up the mousetrap and set it in motion to see all the ways it wouldn’t work. Due to small manufacturing mistakes, the contraption rarely did work. In fact, it was an exciting miracle if it ever did.
I started writing for reasons that are not all that flattering to me. It was over a boy, of course.
You know that thing you do when you find out somebody you like enjoys some activity or experience and so you try to get into that thing so that you can build a kind of bridge with that person?
I have a bad history of these bad ideas around boys. But in this particular case, through a series of happy and sad Mousetrap-like events, I started writing poems which randomly sent in play a boot kicking a yellow bucket, knocking out a silver rolling ball down a green staircase and through the red slide, knocking the green man off the blue diving board and into the yellow tub which shakes down the red mousetrap. And here I find myself 39 years later having written many hundreds of miraculous poems.
When I first started writing, I firmly believed you had to be a dead poet to be famous poet. (I didn’t know any but dead ones.) And misguided by that belief, I did not stop writing. I just lowered by expectations.
Real, real low.
Of course, there are many very well-known poets, but nobody in my immediate family would be able to tell you the name of a single one.
It’s all relative.
Romanticism idealized both eschewing fame and expecting it. And many of us are stuck there in that perplexing purgatory.
In the forward to Margaret Atwood’s book Negotiating with the Dead, a Writer on Writing she lists two full pages of reasons why writers write including some really funny examples:
- To show those bastards
- To delight and instruct
- Or else I would die!
- Because I didn’t want a job
- To make myself seem more interesting than I was
- To attract the love of a beautiful woman
- To rectify a miserable childhood
- To serve art
- To serve history
- To make a name that would survive my death
- To experiment
- To expose appalling wrongs or atrocities
- To give back
There’s plenty more. Later in chapter three, entitled “Dedication,” Atwood talks about the Lewis Hyde book The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life and quotes Hyde to say, “any equation that tries to connect literary value and money is juggling apples and oranges.”
Atwood talks about economic exchange versus gift exchange. She says
“the part of any poem or novel that makes it a work of art doesn’t derive it’s value from the realm of market exchange. It comes from the realm of gift, which has altogether different modes of operating. A gift is not weighted and measured, nor can it be bought. It can’t be expected or demanded; rather it is granted, or else not. In theological terms, it is grace, proceeding from the fullness of being.”
She says, “There are four ways of arranging literary worth and money: good books that make money; good books that don’t make money; bad books that make money; bad books that don’t make money.”
So obvious it sounds ridiculous.
According to Hyde, the serious artist would be well advised to acquire an agent who can mediate between the realm of art and the realm of money….he may then remain modestly apart….Lacking such protection, he will have to maintain a very firm division in his own soul.”
Poets are obviously lacking such protection. If you’re a writer of privilege, as I am (I have a safety net or two), this is probably an easier “division of the soul.” Being a poet is a dangerous vocation, being an artist is a a risky vocation if you need that money.
Each of us in on a different path with different needs and opportunities.
Now all this is fully granting how awfully depressing it is when you speak through art and no one responds or responds in the right number of YouTube views or the response is confusing and ambiguous or your efforts don’t move the mountain of the muse itself. I know plenty of artists who tried for a while and then stopped.
And then some mediums of art cost more money than others. Films require big outlays, for example.
But then I think of a lifetime of effort I’ve spent writing many hundreds of poems, paying off a gigantic loan to have been able to go to Sarah Lawrence College (still not done yet).
I’ve never had a fortune in money, but I’ve spent the Imperial Palace in time. And how do you qualify that?
And it was my idea. Am I due a reward for it? Nobody came to me and asked me to do it.
“We really need this poem, Mary.”
I can’t get back this whole life. Nor would I want to. For me my art is like my love. Given freely or it has no value at all. No exchange required.
But then I think fundamentally I’m working under the paradigm of the gift exchange and not the market exchange. Of course I would like to be read, but on a much lesser scale of readership that those who are working under the market exchange.
It’s like throwing parties. My parties are very small. They’re like the parties in the Katharine Hepburn/Cary Grant movie Holiday (one of my favorite things ever). I feel like I’m essentially the Mrs. Potter character trying to find that very small party beyond the very big one, the more electric one on the third floor with all the eccentric and funny screwballs: Johnny, Linda, Professor Nick and Ned. Those people seeking “of esteem” over the blinding bling downstairs, the people who make due with imaginary butter on their enchanting parsnips.
