on craft and the odds being stacked against us
some reading materials!
This one’s long, and Gmail’s going to cut me off, so please click on the title to read in a new window if you want to make it to the end!
What I’m reading:
“Rhyming Action” by Charles Baxter
“Against Catharsis: Writing is Not Therapy” T Kira Madden
“On Making Things Up: Some True Stories About Writing My Novel” Julie Buntin
“Fuck the Poetry Police: On the Index of Major Literary Prizes in the United States” by Dan Sinykin
“On Poets and Prizes” by Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young
On craft:
I read “Rhyming Action” this week and thought it articulated really well the impulse to rhyme or build upon images in writing and how that quickly can feel overdetermined and overly self-conscious. It was also really funny. God bless.
Here are some quotations from the craft essay:
My friends the poets like me better now that I no longer write poetry. It always got in the way of our friendships, my being a poet, and writing poems. The one thing that can get a poet irritated and upset is the thought of another poet’s poems. Now that I do not write poetry, I am better able to watch the spontaneous combustion of poets at a distance.
Prose writers, however, are no better. Their souls are usually heavy and managerial. Prose writers of fiction are by nature a sullen bunch. The strain of inventing one plausible event after another in a coherent chain of narrative tends to show in their faces. As Nietzsche says about Christians, you can tell from their faces that they don’t enjoy doing what they do. Fiction writers cluster in the unlit corners of the room, silently observing everybody, including the poets, who are usually having a fine time in the center spotlight, making a spectacle of themselves as they eat the popcorn and drink the beer and gossip about other poets. Usually it’s the poets who leave the mess just as it was, the empty bottles and the stains on the carpet and the scrawled phrases they have written down on the backs of pizza delivery boxes—phrases to be used for future poems, no doubt, and it’s the prose writers who in the morning usually have to clean all of this up. Poets think that a household mess is picturesque—for them it’s the contemporary equivalent of a field of daffodils. The poets start the party and dance the longest, but they don’t know how to plug in the audio system, and they have to wait for the prose writers to show them where the on/off switch is. In general, poets do not know where the on/off switch is, anywhere in life. They are usually off unless they are forcibly turned on, and they stay on until they are taken to the emergency room, where they are medicated and turned off again.
You can be a prose writer without having any kind of primary relation to the gods, but poets are often god-touched, when they are not being butchered by the gods, and this fate affects them in curious ways. They think about fate often if not obsessively. Like other nobles who spend their days scouting the heavens, however, poets have little understanding of most worldly occupations, except for writing poems and falling in love and having great sex, which is why half of their poems are about writing poems or falling in love and having great sex.
Most stories have some elements of time-reversal, of what I’d call stutter-memories, or rhyming action.
What can be beautiful about terror?
Trauma is not a progressive narrative. It is a loop.
What are these trace memories, these images, but visitors or visitations from our pasts?
Paradise is less plausible than Hell, but it is surely no less real.
I also thought T Kira Madden’s “Against Catharsis: Writing is Not Therapy” was worth sharing.
Here are a few quotations from that essay:
It must be so healing to write memoir is something I hear no fewer than a few times a day. It must be so therapeutic, so cathartic. These are the most popular words. The people who use these words mean well (for the most part). The people who say these words to me are saying them because I wrote a memoir about being a child—and now, an adult—on the other side of the glass. I have written into the memories and the smells of all the locked bathroom doors, the scorched foils; I have written about my father trying to drink gasoline as he came down from a bender, and my mother’s overdose on opiates, her subsequent coma. I have written about the blood of that. The baseball bat in my father’s hands as he tried to kill me while drunk. I’ve written into the sound of my mother’s skull cracking on tile floor, and I’ve written my father’s body as it lay in a hospital bed, his skin flickering with every color of a sunset like someone beautiful until he died and he went from someone to something and his hands went cold.
I wanted my memoir to feel like The Story. Look at it. Feel it, even. I have wrangled it all into something beautiful. Of course I have healed, because I was able to write it. The Story itself is the proof.
Writing, for me, is no catharsis.
Writing is work. Writing is my job. Writing is the only divinity or spirituality I have found, a medium through which, at my best, I can speak through time and space; I can communicate across state lines and oceans.
I want us to de-romanticize the way we’d like to read and describe memoir—voyeuristic and raw and vulnerable and brave—and wipe the metaphorical blood from the typewriter (eh hem, computer) and admit that all writing, all art, is projection, illusion, a performance. Documentary photographers are still lighting their shots. They are still choosing just the right angle to allow us—the viewers—to take in the glory of the subject, or the absolute despair. There are other people and other scenes just inches outside of the frame, other ways to focus the lens. The photographer is not choosing the low speed film and wide shot to dupe us, they’re making these choices to show us the truth.
Writing—both fiction and nonfiction—is simply an attempt at translation.
As a writer, doing my job, I considered a few possibilities to achieve this: I could repeat the scene, simply bring us back to my body, to the epiphany. Another, stronger option: I could bend us back into the scene, but extend it with new information. I could turn around instead of walking away, looking for the boy. I could return to the car after dinner to see if either the mother or boy were still there, and perhaps there’s a trace of them—a lost button, an earring. I could identify the man, or silhouette of a man, as the boy’s father. Make peace by connecting that boy’s father to my own. A final, different route: I could resist the epiphanic ending and flatten the opening scene. Pan to me, walking away in the dark, on an ambiguous note about the wind howling. Maybe even use the rhyming action to link the sound of the boy to the sound of my mother, now, breathing. That’s the writer’s impulse in me. That’s me storying the experience, tidying it, creating the kind of arc you might feel.
My writing is all scaffolding and reconstruction, imagination and reach.
An incomplete list of what has actually been cathartic and healing for me: dancing, saying No, sex with women, masturbation, driving through Central Park on 86th Street with my windows down—the slight temperature dip that comes over my arms first, just by being near green, therapy, hypnosis, teaching, activism, feeling spellbound and outside of myself in any movie theater, anywhere; driving parallel to powerlines (especially when they silver like needles in the sun), Charlie Parker and Tracy Chapman and Lester Young and Billie Holiday. My fiancée, Hannah. Road trips with the people I love. Making soup—completing every step until those steps add up to something surprising and nourishing and accomplished.
A set-up must always have a pay-off. Even better, a defamiliarization. A transformation.
Julie Buntin’s “On Making Things Up: Some True Stories About Writing My Novel” was also good.
Here are a few quotations:
I often start with a real memory, or a fragment of one. An image, a feeling, usually something that’s tender when I press on it, something that hurts. Shame.
The first time I published something about my friend’s death, I mentioned, to the people who asked what I was writing, that I was working on a novel inspired by what happened. Inspired by. What a stupid thing to say. What I meant was: I felt her loss profoundly, and I was urgently moved to write about girlhood because of it, the dangers lurking there, dangers that had not only stolen my friend’s life, but were threatening my sister too. Dangers I had somehow escaped. My novel is not the story of what happened to my friend, what happened to my sister, but it is a story about girls destroying themselves—why and how, the ways it might be possible to recover, and the ways it is not.
Often, I’ve heard writers and critics say fiction allows for a greater truth. I used to love this idea; it captured the exhilarating feeling I got when reading certain books, of the world coming gloriously into focus. But the idea has started to smell a little off to me lately, with its implication that there’s an emotional truth that is somehow superior to reality, and that writers have unique access to this higher realm. There are true stories, and there are invented stories. There are memoirs, which, though subjective, have an alliance to fact, and there are novels. As a novelist, I don’t deal in truth. I want you to believe every single word I say, but don’t be fooled—I’m using lies to convince you.
On the odds being stacked against us:
I’m late, but I finally read “Fuck the Poetry Police: On the Index of Major Literary Prizes in the United States.” I really love thorough research on the politics and realities of literary prizes and, specifically, poetry prizes because they make me feel better about my books being rejected for six years straight. Also it’s good to know the odds. If you’re in an MFA/PhD program now, you should research the odds of finding a tenure track position in a desirable state, too. Sobering reality.
Anyway, here’s a quotation:
They found that writers “with an elite degree (Ivy League, Stanford, University of Chicago) are nine times more likely to win than those without one. And more specifically, those who attended Harvard are 17 times more likely to win.” They found that half of the prize-winners with an MFA “went to just four schools: [University of] Iowa, Columbia, NYU, or UC Irvine.” Iowa has special clout: its alumni “are 49 times more likely to win compared to writers who earned their MFA at any other program since 2000.”
I then (again, very late) read “On Poets and Prizes” by Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young. Tremendous research. Wow.
Here are some quotations:
Adrienne Rich, for instance, took home just short of a million dollars between 1974 and 2003, or the equivalent of over $30,000 a year for those 29 years (and if you adjust those numbers to 2020 equivalents, it comes out to about $1,600,000 or $55,000 a year). For prize winning poets, these winnings are supplemented by what prestige can yield, including high-profile readings, bookings through speaker’s agents and bureaus, academic jobs, and residencies. But for every well-awarded writer like Rich, there are many poets, many well-known and well-respected poets even, who never receive a major literary prize. There are also entire aesthetic tendencies that are not well represented in this network of prize winners. Those who write more experimentally, from the beats to the Language poets, show up only occasionally and usually in the singular. Slam and spoken word poets have also traditionally been excluded, although Sam Sax’s and Danez Smith’s recent wins are probably a sign of change.
-Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young
Our data also allowed us to see the degree to which literary excellence is yoked to higher education. Of those 429 winners, over half have a degree of some sort from a cluster of eight schools: Harvard, University of Iowa, Stanford, Columbia, Yale, New York University, University of California, Berkeley, and Princeton. Forty percent also have an MFA and 20 percent of these MFAs were awarded by the U of Iowa alone. Around 60 percent of the poets who get tapped to judge attended that same small cluster of schools.
-Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young
A closer look at the judges and winners of literary prizes illustrates the interpersonal and professional connections through which literary merit accrues. Take the example of Robert Pinsky, who was Poet Laureate from 1997-2000. Among his other awards are the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, the Academy of American Poets’ Lenore Marshall Award, and the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry. This is more than a modest amount of literary trophies, although still far from exceptional. But where Pinsky really stands out is in his capacity as a judge. Pinsky is in some way responsible for awarding over two million dollars in winnings to his peers, during which he judged close to 40 prizes.
Carl Phillips, Pinsky’s student at Boston University, is one among many anointed by Pinsky during those years. Pinsky was on the committees that resulted in Phillips winning a Witter Bynner Poetry Fellowship, a Kingsley Tufts Award, and an Academy of American Poets Fellowship. (These awards predate the “Jorie Graham rule.”) Another characteristic of the US prize system is the manner in which Phillips has followed in Pinsky’s footsteps as a bestower of rewards. Phillips was nominated to become a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets by a committee that would have included Pinsky and he began judging the Tufts award the year after Pinsky vacated the position.
Louise Glück is another poet with both a strong prize record and close-knit connections to other prizewinning poets. Phillips and Pinsky were among the Academy Chancellors to judge the Wallace Stevens Award the year that Glück won. Her other honors include an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, a Pulitzer, a Lannan Award, a Bollingen, a National Book Award, and most recently the Nobel Prize, announced as we were finishing this essay. This brings her winnings so far to a little over a million and a half dollars. As a judge, she has been on enough committees to have played a role in awarding over a million dollars to around 32 of her peers. As with Pinsky and the Tufts, Phillips would eventually replace Glück as judge of the Yale Younger Poets Prize in 2010. Glück is not just among those awarded by Pinsky but also his close friend. “She talks to [him] nearly every day,” noted the Washington Post when announcing her 2003 appointment as Poet Laureate.
-Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young
Reciprocity defines this subculture. Pinsky, Phillips, and Glück all awarded prizes to a small, overlapping group of poets, many of whom in turn awarded them a prize (or vice versa). When Pinsky won the Lenore Marshall, Mark Doty was a judge; so too Pinsky was a judge for Doty’s National Book Award. Galway Kinnell and Sharon Olds both served as judges when Phillips won the Academy of American Poets Fellowship; subsequently Phillips sat on the committees that awarded a Wallace Stevens Award to Kinnell and a Pulitzer to Olds. When Glück won the Pulitzer, Frank Bidart was one of the judges; she was on the committee when Bidart received a Wallace Stevens Award. When Glück won the Bollingen Henri Cole judged, and, again, Glück was on the committee that awarded Cole a Jackson Poetry prize. Literally everyone on the committee that awarded Glück the Wallace Stevens Award had already received a prize in which she played a role as judge: Glück served on the committees that awarded Academy of American Poets Fellowships to Lyn Hejinian, Ellen Bryant Voigt, and Sharon Olds, and a Wallace Stevens award to Gerald Stern. And so on. Figure one captures the back and forth dynamic that we have just described.
-Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young
Because poetry has such strong ties to higher education, the teacher-student relationship becomes deeply consequential in this economy of favors. Teachers are expected to promote the work of their students, to call in favors for them, to write blurbs. This is called mentorship, not cronyism. And the reverse, poets often reward their mentors. This is understood as respecting one’s elders.
-Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young
There are nine poets who have associations with all five awards: Glück, Charles Wright, Conrad Aiken, Howard Nemerov, Mona Van Duyn, Richard Eberhart, Wilbur, Kunitz, and Merwin. These nine won 78 prizes and were involved in awarding almost half the prizes (including 24 prizes to each other) for poetry from 1948-2015. Their demographics represent the prototypical twentieth century prize winner to an almost cartoonish degree: all are white, seven graduated from or attended an ivy league institution, and nearly half went to Harvard.
-Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young
So what is to be done? We are not purists who want to do away with prizes entirely, especially not at the moment they are finally being distributed to a more racially diverse group of writers. But nor do we wish to agitate for a further reformed prize. If there is anything our research has shown us, it is that even as they do their best to course correct towards transparency, equity, and inclusion, prizes will still be prizes. They reflect power imbalances that are larger than the genre of poetry. Much of the cultural production recognized as establishment within the US is produced by those with ties to elite schools and the economy of favors that comes with those degrees. It seems unlikely that a series of rules could ever really combat these conditions (barring a lottery, which would negate the whole premise of a prize). One possibility begins with adjusting one’s perspective and understanding that the prize does not reflect unbiased excellence, but rather exchanges of honors among a small cadre of poets. If from there we accept that poetry is made up of various cadres, and the prize cannot possibly be ecumenical, we could think about how to diversify the prize winnings among these cadres while also reducing the inevitable biases when judges and winners come from the same cadre. This might mean going further than the Jorie Graham rule and insisting that wolves could only ever judge prizes given to libertines who balance apples on their heads who could in turn distribute spoils exclusively to coyotes who could only ever decide which riders of birds should receive that year’s purse for riders of birds. This would be complicated, of course: some poets are both hyena and libertine; some are wolves immersed in pools of apples that do not balance on anyone’s head; others are birds pecking at the eyes of coyotes who float by, serene, embracing antelopes in bubbles. The other option is to accept that this economy of favors cannot be undone without a dramatic rethinking of how poets are supported, valued, and ultimately understood to be excellent, which would require creating new metrics for evaluation. We are not sure what these would be. But we do think that this would perhaps be an opportunity to reconnect us to what matters about poetry: its atypical thinking, its counter-institutional possibilities, its ability to stir emotions, its beauty and its grace too.
-Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young
On the subject of craft, here are a few old posts from me:
& on the subject of how hard it is to achieve any modicum of traditional “success” (monetary, cultural, etc.) as a writer:
Community > everything!!!!
Have a good week!