Becoming A Poet, Hating The Holidays
I Knew I Was a Real Poet When I Tried to Pay for a Taco with a Sonnet
And other answers to unsolicited questions.
“I’ve decided to become a poet. How should I begin?” — Versified Val
Awesome. Most of my best friends are poets. You are joining a fellowship of people who look at the world in a unique way: from the point of view of being poor, underappreciated and unread. But there’s just something about turning words over and over, seeing what they can do, like flipping pancakes with a buttery spatula, that makes it all somehow worth it. Don’t worry about it. Like everything else, poetry is more fun at the very beginning.
You can start in any way you want. Writing haikus about your favorite TV shows. Everybody loves TV now. Some poets like to think of work in projects. The idea behind the project or concept of the project might be alluring enough to get yourself some readers. You can write one poem at a time. That’s a harder way to go about it. You have to wander around your daily life accumulating experiences, small wisdom and collections of words until you have enough to fill like a page.
You do not have to write in forms. We’ve gotten to the point in poems in which no one has to rhyme or know anything about prosody to be a poet. Awesome. Rhyming and prosody are a pain in the ass. Rap does most of the rhyming now. And those guys get really rich.
Attending poetry readings can be very helpful to most poets starting off. Mostly so you can see the kinds of things you probably don’t want to do. Some poets put on this very serious “poetry voice.” The best poetry voice I can think of off the top of my head is like Robert Pinsky, who is the Barry White of American Poetry. He could read the phone book and the phone book would win a National Book Award. But my personal favorite is Eileen Myles, whose Boston/Cambridge accent comes back strong during poetry readings.
Other poets like to tell long, involved prose story/jokes to set up their poems. “This piece is about how I’d feel during a zombie invasion when I’ve run out of Pop Tarts. It’s called ‘Running Out of Pop Tarts During the Zombie Invasion.’” You’d be better off putting all that stuff in your poems. Whether you charm an audience or not, you will still be judged by how good your poems are. Not how snappy your banter is. Many poets should just become professional banterers and leave the poems behind entirely.
Send poems to every place that accepts poems. I am still waiting to hear back from The New Yorker on the poems I sent six months ago. I will never get into The New Yorker. That doesn’t mean I’m going to stop sending them poetry. It’s been four months, New Yorker. Get to work. Prairie Schooner rejected my poems earlier this year. I should send them more just to spite them. But I don’t even know if they pay. Poetry magazine has like $200 million, so send them work whenever you can. You deserve some of that Ruth Lilly money. Poetry never even published Ruth Lilly’s poems! And she still gave them $200 million! It would be better off in your pocket, don’t you think? It’s important to get paid for your poetry once in awhile or everyone around you will think it’s just some kind of silly hobby. When, in fact, it is the moment your soul feels most at ease in the universe.
It helps to have poetry pals who like your work and are generally supportive of your efforts. But poetry is really every person for themselves. Lots of people will tell you to go to school if you want to be a real poet but all you have to do is go to the library and read lots of poetry and have lots of affairs with other poets. You can steal their best lines while they are sleeping. For free! Poets who get onto the merry-go-round of academia usually get seasick with politics and disappointment. And never quit writing poems! The older you get the more awards they’ll give you just for not dying yet! Good luck!
“I went to the mall the other day and the Holiday stuff was already up. I hate the Holidays. What can I do to avoid it?” — Gus the Grinch
Stop watching live TV and fast forward through all the ads. If you turn the heat up in your apartment to like 80ºF you can pretend it’s still June! Time is essentially meaningless, just our trip around a sun that allegedly keeps us alive if you believe we’re not all already dead and this is Hell. You could always make up other holidays. Not Buying Stuff Day. And Smoking Weed Week. If you have to go to the mall, just pretend it’s August or April. And that all the holiday stuff is just some new style everyone is wacky about.
I did succumb to some of the Pumpkin Spice nonsense this year. And I will very likely enjoy some of the Nog when Nog Season begins. It’s cheerful to break up the year into drinking pink wines one week and dark beers another. Don’t let it all get to you, Gus. Retail stores just don’t make much money outside of the Holidays so they start in September and end in February. Holiday movies are fun, but I don’t start getting into them until November. By December, I’m done with the whole thing and ready for Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday.
Jim Behrle lives in Jersey City, NJ and works in a bookstore.