from "Afterword: A Few Thoughts about Publication"

Dawn Potter

“The line of words fingers your own heart,” writes Annie Dillard. “It invades arteries, and enters the heart on a flood of breath.”

But when I reach the end of a draft, suddenly the aloneness of writing becomes intolerable. Someone, somewhere, must need my poem. Where can I send it? I don’t have a moment to waste! I’ve moved from concentrating on the poem to drifting into the daydream that Natalia Ginzburg describes so well:

I used to think that one day some famous poet would discover [my poems] and have them published and write long articles about me; I imagined the words and phrases of those articles and I composed them from beginning to end, in my head. I imagined that I would win the Fracchia prize. I had heard that there was such a prize for writers. As I was unable to publish my poems in a book, since I didn’t know any famous poets, I copied them neatly into an exercise book and drew a little flower on the title page and made an index and everything.

Ginzburg’s words capture the goofy sweetness of a writer’s hopes. They remind me of my own silly dreams, not to mention the sheaves of bad poetry I’ve written over the course of my life. Still, I believe it’s important to cherish ambition in its innocence, not only in our students and friends but in ourselves. Even Milton, that canonical heavyweight, once whispered, “Listen, . . . but in secret, lest I blush; and let me talk to you grandiloquently for a while. You ask what I am thinking of? So help me God, an immortality of fame. What am I doing? Growing my wings and practicing flight. But my Pegasus still raises himself on very tender wings.”

Writers yearn for readers. They are the other half of the conversation, the one we idealize in our minds as we struggle with the unwieldy materials of our art. It’s natural and right to feel this way. Our ongoing imaginary conversations not only help us frame and dramatize our thoughts, but they also remind us of the heavy moral obligations of speech. Nonetheless, you’ve no doubt read plenty of interviews in which some famous writer snarls her version of “publication is a soul-sucking waste.” Cynically, you note that this particular writer has published stacks of books and shows no signs of abandoning ship. Yet it’s hard to forget her words, for they seem to deride your own dreams.

Ginzburg reminds us that there are reasons to sympathize with the predicament of writers who have succeeded in making their art the center of their lives:

As a vocation [writing] is no joke. . . . We are constantly threatened with dangers whenever we write a page. . . . The days and houses of our life, the days and houses of the people with whom we are involved, books and images and thoughts and conversations—all these things feed it, and it grows within us. It is a vocation which also feeds on terrible things, it swallows the best and worst in our lives and our evil feelings flow in its blood just as much as our benevolent feelings.

Commitment to a vocation changes an artist. Suddenly the daydreams that sustained her as an apprentice retreat into the shadows. As she becomes more entangled in her art, she often becomes less able to endure the business side of writing: submissions, self-promotion, interviews. If she is earning enough money from her work, she can hire a publicist or an agent to help manage that rift. But this is rarely the case with poets, most of whom earn almost nothing from their books. A cranky, dismissive writer may in truth be desperately overwhelmed by the dangers of her art.

[from a draft of The Conversation: Learning to Be a Poet (Autumn House Press, 2014)].