Linh: Everyone wants power. And money. And fame. Get over it.–Kenneth Goldsmith
I don’t seem to want power or money or fame. I only seem to want food and shelter, (library) books and good friends.–Unreliable Narrator
He said, she said, but I say that if power, money and fame are your primary objectives in life, then poetry is a dismal career choice. Imagine hearing your teenaged offspring confiding at the dinner table, his or her mouth stuffed with Chef Boy R Dee, “Mom, dad, since I won’t rest until I’ve achieved lots of power, money and fame, I’ve decided to study noncreative writing with Kenneth Goldsmith at the University of Pennsylvania.” With tuition for 2008-2009 at $37,526 and rising fast, $51,300 if you count cost of living, I’d advise against such a bold choice, unless you’re really dedicated to non-creativity, then go for broke, literally, and don’t look back!
Sure, it’s nice to always have enough change to eat, at least, and be sheltered, but money and power—I’ll leave out fame, for now–are rarely the rewards for those who won’t quit emjambing, starting from early youth, even as rejection slips flutter around their ankles, so what they’re chasing must be more pathetic and sublime than anything that would interest, say, Hank Paulson, Bernard Madoff or George W. Bush?
Let’s check in on Erasmus, speaking as the voice of Folly: “Poets aren’t so much in my debt, though they’re admittedly members of my party, as they’re a free race, as the saying goes, whose sole interest lies in delighting the ears of the foolish with pure nonsense and silly tales. Yet strange to say, they rely on these for the immortality and god-like life they assure themselves, and they make similar promises to others. ‘Self-love and flattery’ are their special friends, and no other race of men worships me with such wholehearted devotion [...] Of the same kidney are those who court immortal fame by writing books. They all owe a great deal to me, especially any who blot their pages with unadulterated rubbish. But people who use their erudition to write for a learned minority and are anxious to have either Persius or Laelius pass judgment don’t seem to me favored by fortune but rather to be pitied for their continuous self-torture. They add, change, remove, lay aside, take up, rephrase, show to their friends, keep for nine years and are never satisfied. And their futile reward, a word of praise from a handful of people, they win at such a cost – so many late nights, such loss of sleep, sweetest of all things, and so much sweat and anguish. Then their health deteriorates, their looks are destroyed, they suffer partial or total blindness, poverty, ill-will, denial of pleasure, premature old age and early death, and whatever remaining disasters there may be. Yet the wise man believes he is compensated for everything if he wins the approval of one or another purblind scholar.”
To conflate poetry with power, money and fame, one should go back to imperial China, with its mandarinate exams. Starting in the 7th century, it sought to supplant the leverage of the regional, hereditary aristocracy with a national test rewarding those who could master the Four Books and Five Classics of the Confucian canon, including the Book of Songs, an anthology of 305 poems, mostly folk lyrics, supposedly collected by Confucius himself. (Nonsense.) Emanating from the center of empire, this selection process was a power play to encourage and enforce cultural unity and an ideology of obedience, primarily to the state. By requiring knowledge of the Book of Songs, however, it also created generations of bureaucrats who had studied at least 305 poems, and could effortlessly crank out a few themselves. In the 20th century, Westerners have often marveled that the East Asian Communist dictators, Mao, Ho and Kim Jong Il, could write poetry, but this felicity was merely an echo from the mandarinate exams of the imperial era.
The fact that mandarins could emote in rhymes made many East Asian poets fantasize that they, too, could become movers and shakers. “Shoot, I oughta be a mandarin.” Well aware of this lingering vanity, East Asian Communist states bait and reward obedient poets with officious titles and perks, including foreign travel for the most docile. In Vietnam, members of the government-sanctioned Writers’ Union are invited to pompous annual conferences, where they can applaud lecturing politicians, then hop on stage to declare their fealty. The most vital Vietnamese poetry, however, is not penned by these marionettes. Instead of gravitating towards power, money and fame, the best and most radical Vietnamese poets have risked prison and lifelong poverty to write what they had to, compelled by a suprarational and frankly heroic, if not suicidal, impulse. Consider Trần Dần: born in 1926, he joined, as a twenty-year-old, the Communist resistance against the French, but by 1953, had fallen out of favor with the Party for speaking his mind. In 1956, he was jailed by the Communists for three months in Hoả Lò [The Furnace], better known to Americans as Hanoi Hilton, where he tried to commit suicide. Released, he became a key figure of the dissident group, Nhân Văn Giai Phẩm, that was quickly suppressed, all of its members jailed and silenced, with Trần Dần forced to do hard labor for months at a time. For 29 years, 1959 until 1988, he was completely banned from publishing, although he continued to write novels and some the most radical and striking poetry in Vietnamese literature. Thanks to its intricate wordplay, it hasn’t been adequately translated into any foreign language. Had Trần Dần accommodated the power structure at any point, his life, not to mention those of his wife and children, would have been much easier, but he never did, and why not? Could it be because he was a true poet? Nah, what a silly idea!
It’s human nature to gravitate towards money, power and fame, and to admire, if not kiss ass, those who have them, and to shun, ridicule or despise those who don’t. Wealth exudes glamour, even beauty, as in “the beautiful people” to denote the “jet set.” If to be radical is to go against the grain, what can one make of a poet who aligns himself with all the prevailing ethos of his place and time, be it a craving for money, power, fame, narcissism, or the glorification of trivia, ephemera, shopping and the machine? Is it possible to be more orthodox?
17 Comments for “Power, Money and Fame”
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Linh, dearest,
‘m going to have to treat you to lunch somewhere really glam in Philly before class. We’ll have a good time.
I’m serious.
Luv, Kenny G
Yo Kenny,
We’ll check our weapons at the door, but no glam place for me. How about a cheap bar? I’ll buy the first pitcher of Black and Tan ($7).
Oh and PS—food, shelter, and also a cat. Can’t write without a cat.
I’m sick of hero-celebrities, idols, wearing elaborate glittering costumes, made of rumor, adulation, education, prestige, publicity… I’m sick of poets!
Give me the nondescript anonymous people, who have sense enough to keep their own counsel. Those who struggle every day caring for their own, without doing injustice to anyone else. Those who open their bare cupboards & crowded floors to strangers, neighbors & relatives… Those children who are too exhausted & disillusioned not to speak the plain truth.
These are my heroes. They are not luminaries of any sort whatsoever.
Poets are foolish. This is part of the subtle drama, I guess. They can’t help themselves. They are holy fools, unholy fools.
Right on, Linh. No swag for this art brut.
Welp, Harriet will getcha for being sycophantic as well as too stroppy—my comment got eaten, which is why it says “PS” above, postscript to nothing. Maybe I forgot to use quotation marks around my own Erasmus citation?
Any rate, now I can’t remember what I said, which is obviously for the better; only I was moved by the story of Trần Dần and hope to read him someday.
Power – no. Anyone who wants to boss anyone else around is crazy.
Fame – if that = respect and decent treatment, then I want it. If it means papparazzi, then, well, not essential.
Money – admission: I’m 58. Retirement looms. It would be nice to have enough $$ to afford to keep buying books (especially those by you people), printing paper, to keep a little press going, and to be able to afford health insurance, and some occasional travel. That does take $$. So yes, I do want some.
FLAGELLANTS, OR THE INFAMOUS WORD GAME
Goldsmith–
We know it’s no game,
We know it’s insane,
We know it’s torture
Us racking our brain,
So give us a break
If you know its name–
What’s that
Powerful, precious, fleeting
Four-letter word rhyming with
Pain?
But Henry, on your blog, which you apparently want people to read as you link to it in every post, you write that you believe you yourself are “the best US poet living today.” Do you really believe this? If so, how do you reconcile such claims with a valuation of non-descript anti-lumination?
Is there a Poet Celebdex, like a Forbes Top Earner’s list of the Top Ten Wealthiest/Most Famous Poets? How much is Kenneth Goldsmith worth? How much did he move and shake, up or down, this week?
Ironic, isn’t it, watching that YouTube of Kenny and Kasey Mohammad drinking martinis at a “glam” bar discussing poetic relevance, all lovingly recorded by Nada Gordon on glam cell phone? No one would ever know that bombs were going off in the Middle East or the global market was continuing to nosedive at that very moment.
How relevant is it that $7 for one glam martini — or even for a more earthy pitcher of Black and Tan — would hardly cover a humble dinner for a family of 3 tonight?
That’s OK, Kenny — and you other movers and shakers on The Poet Celebdex. Just keep partying like it’s 1999!
Thanks for asking, Noah. Yes, I am the greatest living American poet. How do I reconcile this with anonymity (& rejection slips)? I make sure my poems are unreadable & unpublished.
No, just kidding. That was a stupid stentorian pompous post (above). My apologies.
There is poetry & there is conversation about poetry. Both of them, I think, are important. But it’s important to realize that they are totally irreconcilable discourses.
They each have their delights & there illuminations. they each show pathways to new knowledge & understanding.
But poetry is poetry. & poetry is vastly more concrete & multidimensional & touching & deep than the endless discussion ABOUT poetry – poets’ speculation ABOUT what they THINK they are doing….
“Humility is endless” – TS Eliot
Angela,
Yes, you’re right. If poets would stop drinking martinis, the bombs would stop falling and we’d solve world hunger on top of it. I’ll toast to that.
Kenneth
Hey Angela, how many lives does sanctimony save? Oh, wait, I remember now.
why should any life be saved ?
or taken away ?
i think angela is merely showing the terrific discrepancy
that exists or TRYING to show
the terrific discrepancy that exists
between these various worlds
maybe it’s an opportunity to
wake up is all
Michael and Kenneth, your comments are perfect examples of what Linh talks about when he says, “It’s human nature to gravitate towards money, power and fame, and to admire, if not kiss ass, those who have them, and to shun, ridicule or despise those who don’t.”
Regarding money and power in poetry, consider this 2006 essay by Steve Evans:
Free (Market) Verse
Ten years ago, when the New York Times Magazine set out to caricature the leading tendencies in the poetry world, it used the occasion of James Merrill’s death to file an obituary for the “poetry establishment” as a whole. Without that elegant poet’s inherited millions (his father was the Merrill in Merrill Lynch), which had trickled down to fellow poets via the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the clubby uptown world of old-style patronage—donor readings at J.P. Morgan’s former home, easy access to the pages of The New Yorker, cushy tenured chairs, guaranteed publication by FSG and Knopf, and a monopoly on prestige- and cash-conferring prizes—was fast unraveling. Barbarians of various descriptions—Language Poets, Hip Hop Poets, Neo-Formalists, Surrealists, and Nuyorican slam poets—were assembling at the gate. And it wasn’t another exquisitely crafted, emotionally muted, slyly allusive poem—such as Merrill had made his reputation on—that they were clamoring for.
If there was no trace in the magazine’s cartoon gallery of a cohort of midwestern white guys with business backgrounds aspiring to write instantly “accessible” poems about authentic American life for the amusement and improvement of semi-literate “regular” folks, that’s because it would take a presidency as benighted and hokey as that of George W. Bush to bring such a group to prominence. Through men like Dana Gioia, John Barr, and Ted Kooser, Karl Rove’s battle-tested blend of unapologetic economic elitism and reactionary cultural populism is now being marketed in the far-off reaches of the poetry world. A curiously timed gift from a pharmaceutical heir who, before slipping into four decades of crippling depression, had submitted a pseudonymous item or two to Chicago’s Poetry magazine, which politely rejected them, has bankrolled the unlikely effort.
What interested most people about Ruth Lilly’s hundred-million-dollar gift to Poetry, publicly announced in the late fall of 2002, was the sheer size of the sum. Though she bestowed even more money on an organization called Americans for the Arts, the idea that a quaintly penurious outfit like Poetry should come into such unexpected riches appealed to the journalistic imagination. The charming, Dickensian narrative involved shabby, sunless quarters in a library basement inhabited by a chain-smoking, lunch-skipping editor who had for two decades heroically sacrificed all to the culling—from ninety thousand submissions a year—of the few poems good enough to earn their two dollars a line and be brought before the eyes of the magazine’s subscribers. Now, through her mysterious beneficence, Lilly had lifted Poetry from this place of squalor and cultural obsolescence: from a grandparent warehoused in a seedy retirement home, it had been transformed into the newest and richest kid on the block, its financial capital now far exceeding the dwindling symbolic capital it had been husbanding since the days of first-wave modernism [...]
Actually, my comments were examples of my tendency to gravitate away from self-righteous humorlessness. But, hey, that’s just me.