After the reading, the man comes up and asks, If he does write a poem,
what will he get? Then he adds, to make
sure I understand, “How much?” He doesn’t go as far as rubbing his index finger
and thumb together, but he might as well. I wonder how to respond.
You’re usually paid nothing for poems, just copies, (and with the
internet not even that). This horrifies
people who don’t know, and it can result in an awkward moment as if I’ve just
revealed a dirty secret. You can feel the shift in respect from “wow, you’re a
published author” to “wow, you’re some kind of sucker.”
You can make more in any job from babysitting to selling papers on the corner than from poetry.
And, the time might be better spent doing something else: cooking, hiking, learning a skill, even cleaning
out the garage of someone you love.
And the satisfaction of creating something can be muted when it’s so
small. A poem isn’t a novel, a bridge a building; it’s just a few lines, a handful of words.
When I’m asked “What did you do today?” I often flash on Charlie Brown at
Halloween saying, I got a rock. What
did I do? I made a poem. I feel I can sense the pity, the
futility. Oh, Sorry. We’ll put it over here, out of the way, and
maybe you’ll be more productive tomorrow.
Imagine if Jack had come home having traded his cow for poems rather than magic beans. They would get thrown out the window and grow
. . . into nothing. (Okay, yes, some poems may grow inside you, but that
doesn’t
help the starving old woman, does it).
So I look at the man who wants to know what he’ll get, and I remind
myself that he’s here, at a poetry reading, that maybe he might not be thinking what I think he’s thinking or anything I’m thinking. Maybe he does want answers, and although no
one should go to poetry for those since the best are as shifty as Delphic oracles, he’s asking the poet, not the poems.
But the question has nothing to do with poetry, does it. It’s about him. And that’s why I can’t answer
it. What does he get when he eats
soup? When he dresses? Sings?
Stretches? If you bother to live, what will you get? If you bother to
wash, to love, to walk?
Finally, I say, I guess it would depend on what you
write. He nods, satisfied, as if this is
exactly what he expected.
