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Emily Dickinson—hidden away as fame; childless, but mother of us all.
Most poets have—even published ones—very few readers. Even the supposedly famous poets these days have no public, really. The situation of poetry is nearly a crisis—but enough of that. There’s already a surfeit of crisis-rhetoric today. I’m not talking here about how rotten and cheap and prosaic contemporary poetry is—my point here has nothing to do with that. The point of this Scarriet essay is even more embarrassing, if that’s possible: literature is fame; the two are synonymous.
What I say is true. Fame and literature are the same. Pound and Poe—who couldn’t be more different—understood this; the navigation a poet travels to become famous is the poetry, is the whole subject matter of the poet, is the very poet himself.
The two (poetry and fame) cannot be separated.
Is this a cruel thing to say?
I’ll be honest. I published a book on Ben Mazer’s poetry because he was the most famous poet I knew. Mazer—Romantic, avant-garde, it makes no difference—possesses a shadowy, but not quite an actual, sense of what I’m talking about.
I don’t know anyone who does.
I’m not speaking of personal ambition, with mere pleasure as the goal.
Fame and Literature are one. It’s such an obvious fact in the blatant way I am expressing it that even Scarriet didn’t understand it until the insight hit us yesterday—greatly obvious truths remain hidden to the sophisticated, and even published or unpublished cabbie poets who write about “real life” are sophisticated; the very act of being a poet, no matter how humbly, gives one that sophistication which bars one from the obvious truths. You feel it in your bones, sure, but you don’t come out and say it as I am saying it.
Scarriet specializes in too-simple-to-notice truths. Poe was murdered. The “Dark Lady” is a pun on black ink and the sorrowful nature of the written word. “Modernism” is a far-right, Creative Writing business.
Scarriet (since 2009, founded by Alan Cordle of Foetry.com as a mockery of Blog Harriet) is prominent enough to attract seekers after poetic fame. (Charles Bernstein hates me based on what I wrote about him in Scarriet, according to a trusted source.)
In my rather helpless musings on this—“who are you to ask me to take notice of you? I’m not famous; I can’t make you famous”—the truth that an educated, literary, public exists which I may inhabit, notwithstanding—the simple truth, ‘literature is fame,’ plucked me suddenly out of the crowd.
Emily Dickinson is literature—because we talk of her, not because of what she has written. Who among the sophisticated would take notice of this recluse today? None. Hypocrites! You wouldn’t. She would be admired by a few friends, as friends. She would have no literary existence. Those beyond her friends, those slightly more prominent in the poetry-pecking-order (“how many books have you published? where do you teach?”) would ignore her. You would. Don’t lie. Those who happened to see her work would say to themselves, “Hmm. No wonder she isn’t published. One just cannot emote in clumsy half-rhymes upon ‘immortality’ this way. Amateur.”
But now all is different for you and Emily; she is famous—therefore you convince yourself: “oh, this is good!”
Hypocrite. You have no idea whether any poetry is really good or not. Emily Dickinson is famous because others talk about her and because others talk about her, you do, too.
To hide the humiliating fact that her fame alone is what has converted you to the “truth” that she is now worthy, because our minds can convince us of anything—Keats is somewhat good, Cid Corman is good—you practice a liking, done automatically since it is part of the happy entrails-buzz fame (vicarious or not) bestows.
Is this essay’s indictment meant to deconstruct not only your feelings, but literature and fame? Like the infinite—an idea that may, or may not, finally exist (does the universe go on forever?)—fame is untouchable; it is the constant in my equation. You, the inconstant one, with the rest of the hypocrites, having your frothy opinions about which poetry is “good” and which poetry you “like,” find your anchor in fame—in the vast poetry pecking order of fame. Ben Mazer has published many books of poetry, but none with a major publisher, so William Logan will not write on him. Logan is famous for his sharp critical teeth—but his teeth chew on what others think, not thought. He returns from the hunt hauling big game; anything less would be embarrassing. William Logan makes no exception to his reviewing rule; even he lives, like all of us, by fame—from which poetry cries and is indistinguishable.
***
Postscript.
We may still ask: why is ____ famous, but I submit the answer will never be forthcoming, for fame is its own reason for being, therefore analysis cannot enter. Does anyone doubt that God exists and is beyond us, forever clothed in mystery? And that the only living proof of God’s existence which can ever exist (every other proof learnedly and cleverly posited and just as learnedly and cleverly refuted) lies in a path and a small girl—why would you ever announce, cruelly, the end of that path? That she and all whom she loves will vanish and die? Why would you ever do that?
Is there any doubt that fame inspires all greatness to exist—the thrill of fame is the highest, the very opposite of being buried alive—which is the worst condition, as Poe intuited. Fame for the artist is when you know every exciting thing you do is watched and therefore you automatically rise to the glory of the great, lived, non-secret, secret—participation for its own sake.
Did the man who wrote “Yesterday” and “Let It Be” and “Eleanor Rigby” in the 1960s then write nothing of note as an experienced musician for 5 decades? Why did genius manifest itself only in that five year window of towering, exciting, miraculous fame? The answer is self-evident.
If you have ever seen the video of a famous person’s face through time—a fat faced child, the often homely youth, and then the first photo when they are “famous”—the beauty arrives like a miracle—the fire in the eyes, the facial muscles knowing what to do in the face, it is the receptivity of the now ferocious attention re-broadcast and seen as the light, the fire, the joy, the secret knowledge, eternal and ephemeral, of—fame.
Salem, MA, USA
5/8/22