I need a handbook on how to market myself as a poet. And a cheat sheet for all those god-awful questions a poet has to answer about his or her work before a book goes to press—questions like, Who are you writing your poems for? Or to? Who is your ideal audience?
Answer: I have no idea. I’ve never understood the lure of either writing or reading poetry, that seductive pull from some other world.
A few weeks ago, I gave a miserable reading—you know the kind, set in some the dank basement of a bookshop, church or bowling alley, given to a handful of disgruntled souls in folding chairs. Afterwards, an elderly man in a ball cap informed me that I am nothing like my poems. So what are my poems like? I wanted to ask. Instead, I told him that another woman actually writes my poetry. I just try to impersonate her for public events. (He laughed, but I wasn’t really joking.)
Since then, I have been thinking about poets who are like their poems, poets like Denise Duhamel, David Lehman, and Maureen Seaton, poets I read and then feel as if I have just had a conversation with them. I think I would feel that way, even if I didn't know them.
I remember a picnic years ago in Cleveland when Denise Duhamel was teaching at the Imagination Conference, and a student by the nickname of The Beef (I think that’s what his friends called him) sat down next to her and confessed that, after hearing her read, he was certain she was his soul mate. As if to prove his point, The Beef began to perform his poetry for her, reciting poems about his life as an alcoholic. Denise, ever polite, sat smiling and nodding until the director of the program intervened. I was both stunned and a little embarrassed to realize that I, too, have often felt that Denise is my kindred spirit. And I, too, might want to show her the poems I have written in response to her brilliant work. Does that mean that The Beef and I are Denise’s ideal audience? Or the opposite?
Perhaps this is the poem by Denise Duhamel that inspired The Beef’s performance that day.
David Lehman, like Denise, has a gift of making readers feel as if he's talking directly to them. Or, in my case, as if I am still his student, back in his tiny office at Hamilton College, and he’s trying to teach me how to write a poem. I say this today, in particular, because I've been sorting through old journals, throwing away most of them (they are so embarrassing), and I've discovered a few entries that mention David Lehman and remind me of his recent book, Playlist.
Like this one from January 1980:
I had a conference with DL today and, once again, my poem was unspeakably awful. How come I never see a poem’s stinkiness until the professor is looking at it? The good news—David Lehman just zoomed along like the poem wasn’t in the room with us. He didn’t say anything bad. Instead he suggested I name things in my next poem, name songs, name pens, name cereal boxes, name poets, name friends, name boys I love (no way), name drop. And don’t be afraid to talk about the weather. Poetry isn’t a suicide note.
1/14/18
I began thinking
that listing the titles
would be poetry
enough and now it is
thirty degrees and rising
in Ithaca with the dazzle
of sunlight like
diamond spangles
in the snow, the sky
blue and cumulus
clouds drift slowly south
Tonight son Joe and I
will watch The Seven Samurai
until then I must work
on my foreword with
Bill Evans, “Round
Midnight,” backing me up
while the sun
shines right through
the shades so I can’t even see
the type on the screen
on the forties station
Frances Langford
“Serenade in Blue,”
with its amazing
mood-shifting bridge
“but you remaining in my heart.”
And then there is this entry from April, 1980:
It was pouring rain today and I had another DL meeting and his coat was dripping next to my seat and I was soaked to the bone—trempé jusqu'aux os—he asked me how I was and I didn’t want to talk about it. I just wanted to listen to him—he talked so fast—moving from poetry to French to funny (really funny!) stories about people to music to John Ashbery. He loves, loves Ashbery! And names. He loves names. He told me—Ashbery has impeccable taste. How can he have impeccable taste? I asked, and he answered, That’s just what Ashbery has.
And next, read this poem from Playlist:
12/21/17
La chute de reine
is a great French phrase
for the curve at the base of a lady’s back
Archie would have approved
after lunch we’d head to Mayer’s Smoke Shop
and I’d read Barron’s
while he ambled over to Penthouse
after he found a dime and I, three pennies
on the corner of Tioga and Buffalo where
the old post office used to be
and later that day I wrote
a poem for John Ashbery
let’s have it, he said
okay I said here goes
and John said he liked it
particularly the third line
(the poem was only two lines long)
And I thought la chute de reine meant the fall of the queen!
The third poet I want to mention is Maureen Seaton. Whenever I read her work, just as when I read Denise Duhamel’s poems, I imagine she’s sitting beside me, telling me how it is. Maybe it’s no surprise that the two remind me of each other—they have, after all, written so many poems together. They both make me want to laugh and cry and invite them into my living room or maybe on a trip to the beach. (That's why I drew them in shades–all set for our trip to the beach.) Seaton’s latest book, Sweet World, published by CavanKerry Press, is a brave and moving collection about her life with breast cancer.
I'll close with the title poem from the book.
Sweet World
I never had a nemesis before. I kinda like it.
~Felicity Smoak, The Flash
Wonder what I'd be today if I was still married to my Wall Street husband
besides married to a Wall Street husband and puking gin in a silk sheath
at Delmonico's. I might be a blond size 4. I might be a secret Democrat
or a weekend lesbian. This morning five planes flew over the yard in a V
as I was about to dig into a pile of lavender pancakes al fresco. The V
flew low and slow. It flew loud and ominous. It alarmed me, sounding
a lot like the war movies of my fifties' childhood. My cranky Chihuahua
was proverbially biting at flies and I was sitting there not thinking about hate.
Recently, I experienced life with cancer. An intoxicating time, richly infused
with the liquor of death, but good too because no one expected much of me
and I was left to my own mind, which is what I'm missing most these days.
Unless that's it over there, screeching on two wheels around the racetrack.
Today I typed gnos instead of song and I wondered if it was some new app
designed to mess with me. I've never thought to call the world sweet before.
A nemesis can do that for you, make things taste different. Suddenly you're
a hero/ine. All this devastation—and you're still standing in the middle of it.