What Does Success Mean for a Poet

If you’ve been following along with my last few posts (starting with “How to be a poet: A Choose your own adventure story“) you know I’ve been struggling with the idea now of “what to do next.” How to measure true success. Should I keep going with this poetry thing or give it up and, I don’t know, open a gluten-free cupcake shop/bookstore or something.

Yesterday Robert Lee Brewer, who is the editor of Poet’s Market with his first full-length book collection on the way from Press 53, wrote on his blog about “finding success as a poet.” He broke the idea of success down into “Publication Credits, Money, Fame, Artistic Achievement and Immortality” with the idea that some things, like “publication credits” and “money” are measurable, while “fame” and “Immortality” are dubious to try to measure at best. But I don’t know that for me, it can be broken down that easily. As I spoke about before, I have the strong feeling that compromising what you write to be popular or famous will only lead to a feeling of being ultimately cheated.

I’ve been asked in previous interviews about my “success” which I have to put in quotation marks for myself because I really don’t think of myself as successful, even if a younger, more shiny-eyed version of myself might look upon some of the things I’ve accomplished as “success.” Being a practical-minded girl who didn’t grow up with family money, some part of me will always have “being able to support yourself with your work” as the highest priority for success, in which case, I’m dramatically failing. A more romantic version of myself cares about connecting with other people with my work – maybe that’s the ultimate version of success, or the ability to maybe shine light on difficult topics – in case you’re one of those readers who wonders why my work is “so dark” and “focuses on hard things” – because maybe that seems important to me, to talk about cultural issues. But if all I want is to connect with readers, or get people talking about some subject matter, surely there’s an easier route – because most people don’t read poetry at all. Immortality is attractive, but elusive, and always comes with a price. And I also think it’s really hard for a generation to measure their own artistic merit with accuracy, so I’d have trouble judging not only the merits of my own work and the work of my peers, even as a practiced critic, because each generation is blind to some tics and generous to a fault towards others.  So that leaves us with things like publication credits, grants, jobs, awards, etc. Things you would write down on your imaginary CV. The problem with those is, the feeling of success we get with each accomplishment is illusory and fleeting, because as we achieve one step on the icy mountain, the goals we have actually slip up – as soon as we get a glimpse of the snowy top of the mountain, it turns out it wasn’t the top at all, but just another crag to climb. In other words, if you achieve your goal of publishing your first book, then you want a second, and then you want your third to get a book award and good reviews in big places, etc. It’s human nature not to celebrate the present, but brood on past mistakes and fear the future. If you read the journals of famous writers, you can see it – this ability to never really focus on the good things they’ve just done but worry and fuss and fidget (and sometimes, in more extreme examples like Sylvia Plath, even kill themselves) over what they haven’t. I wrote a poem recently about Hedy Lamarr, who was only recognized for her scientific achievements at nearly the end of her life – sometimes the recognition, as Emily Dickinson put it, “comes late, and is held low to freezing lips/ too rapt with frost to take it – how sweet it would have tasted – just a drop…” (From “Victory Comes Late.”)

So I think the question can really only be answered with more questions…but surely Isaac Asimov’s quote would be apropos: ““You must keep sending work out; you must never let a manuscript do nothing but eat its head off in a drawer. You send that work out again and again, while you’re working on another one. If you have talent, you will receive some measure of success – but only if you persist.” So that even when we lose hope, or we become somewhat jaded, or burnt out, we keep coming back, not just to writing, but to writing and sending out that work…hoping that it will achieve for us something…immortality, maybe, publication credit, maybe, connecting to an audience, maybe…

But it terms of career as “poet,” I’ll admit to still being mystified, to wondering “where do we go from here?”

So, how do you define success for a poet? Are some of you struggling? Are you happy with your accomplishments? Are you always aiming upwards towards an increasingly difficult and slippery climb? What is it about this job that leads so many to nervous breakdowns and alcoholism and other destructive behavior…the constant rejections, the dispiriting low pay and lack of readership, the not-exactly-knowing-what-you’ve-done-or-if-you’ve-made-a-difference nature of the job? Or are you able to embrace yourself and your art exactly where you are? Clearly I am shuffling about in my head for definitions, structure, the reassurances of certainty…which just may not exist for a poet. Or maybe it’s just my fever and I should go back to sleep.