on “success” and “successful” in poetry
This picture of Maxine Hong Kingston was taken last month at City Lights Books by Oscar. We were there for the NBCC Awards Finalists Announcements at City Lights Books on January 12th. Actually, I think we were really there to say hi to Rigoberto Gonzalez, who’d blasted in and out of town so fast, that we’d have otherwise missed him.
Anyway, I bring this all up now because I realize that I had no connection otherwise to what was going on in the place, no connection to the NBCC, and few if any connections to any of the finalists or presenters. Seeing Kingston speak, however, reminded me of being a teenager and undergrad at Berkeley, routinely seeing her on campus while I was on my way to class, and getting giddy every time this would happen.
When I was 18, I wanted to be like Kingston, as much as I wanted to be like Amy Tan. Certainly, this has changed since then. But at the time, how big a deal was it for me to actually have these women’s books on my formative bookshelves, and reading them for English literature classes in 1989. It was a really big deal.
That English professors were assigning Tan and Kingston, that we were required to study and discuss them seriously, that was what I wanted to happen to me, when I realized it was actually possible to be an API woman author read and discussed seriously, not as tokens, but as creators of American literature, by academics.
As well, I was soon to learn that Kingston and Tan were the “whipping girls” of one Frank Chin, for their allegedly negative portrayals of API men and their alleged appropriations of their own cultures. You know what? I dug this too, not so much the juiciness of it, but rather, that pointed discussion was being had here, that schisms in “our communities” were being revealed, and that API women could speak, relatively undaunted by what I saw and understood as masculinism, sexism, and/or gatekeeping male dominance.
Whether or not Kingston’s and Tan’s portrayals of API men is negative, whether they capitalized on their cultures, as has been suggested, is not my point here. What I mean to say is that I perceived their popularity, and the vehement discussions arising from their published work in both literary and API circles as a level of success I’d wished to attain. The alternative I thought for my own work, if it were ever to get published, was that no one would read it, or that no one who read it would remember it or care about it.
I bring this all up now because there’s discussion occurring in e-world regarding “success” in poetry. C. Dale Young is asking what in the world “successful poet” means. Silliman continues to blog his responses to the Poetry Foundation questionnaire, and discusses here the importance of the independent bookstore in connecting the poet with potential readerships. Rigoberto Gonzalez, whom Oscar and I got to chat with over dinner after the NBCC event, discussed his many poetry and literature projects, and this was simply awesome to me, his focus, energy level, and enthusiasm, his ability to work. Ultimately, his ability to inspire, coercion-free, is something I hope I am able to also do, when poets and folks come to me seeking poetic answers.
I feel hella dispirited, demoralized by poetry world folks’ masamang ugali (I can’t think of an equivalent effective English term), and folks who think it’s perfectly OK to coerce and impose their definitions of poetry and success on others because theirs is right, and theirs is the only way.
That’s a lot different than believing strongly in our own definitions and work, surrounding ourselves with like-minded folk, and/or similar-work-ethic folk, and actually working; I think I am more successful in finding community where the work is intense, high energy level, concrete/results producing, and hence (to me) inspiring.
OK, enough of this. Off to Berkeley I go.
