The Editors Have Made Their Decision

Congratulations, she said, the editors have selected you to contribute a volume of essays on contemporary poetry to our prestigious annual book series The Empirical Poem. I'm sorry, he said, editors? At the university press, she said, the screening process is a highly competitive one each year; fierce, even, some might say. I think you have the wrong number, he said, or maybe you're mistaking me for someone else; I'm an attorney, you see, not a poet. Ah, like Stevens, she said, both in your choice of vocation, I mean, and characteristic modesty; it's quite charming. Thank you, he said, but seriously, I have never written a single poem in my entire life. This is a great honor, she said, and perhaps you misunderstood me—the book will be a volume of critical essays, not poems, goodness no. You know, I think the last poem I ever read, he said, was that business about the wheelbarrow and the wet chicken. Are you suggesting, she said, that the editors are just out here playing knuckleball? So much depends on, he said, something something. Do you think the editors are fucking around, she said, flinging around a career-making commission like this willy-nilly, for a book series that has included Pfliegman's shrewd analysis of Dylan Thomas's correlative capability, Schopenhauer's award-winning study of Manxian praxis, and Rosenbaum's astonishing discourse on the poetry of babies? Something something, wet chickens, he said, I always did like that one. You decline an accolade like this, you don't just embarrass yourself, she said, you're telling everyone who's ever written a book for The Empirical Poem to go fuck themselves. I'm sorry, he said, it all sounds very fancy. The university is handing you a free meal, she said, and you're shitting on the cutlery. It's been a long day, he said, and I don't mean to sound ungrateful. I'm offering you a goddamn tenure track to Sittingprettyville, and you're forgetting that there's a difference between the outward appearance of grandiosity, she said, and the truly grand; I mean, don't lawyers fucking understand intuitively that in order to get sausage, you have to break a few eggs? Trust me, I know an egg from a spitball, he said, but where my head is at today is, if an independent pig farmer in Kentucky gets a tip to short the Chicago pork market from his growth hormone dealer, does that constitute insider trading? It would depend, she said, on whether you were talking about pork futures or pork hedge funds. See, he said, now we're talking. That is, she said, just one woman's opinion. Don't be so modest, he said, I've got a proposition for you. Okay, she said, I think I smell what you're cooking. So long as most of the essays, he said, will be about wheelbarrows and wet chickens. So long as most of my securities fraud work was in beef, she said. You know, he said, I'm an alumnus of the university. I was a litigator in Lubbock, she said, in another lifetime. Please convey my gratitude to the editors, he said, really, it's an honor. It's the curveballs, she said, that delight.

The Common Reader: A Confession

When it happened I was standing in a bookstore reading. I had stopped at Three Lives on the way home ostensibly looking for a particular book, even though I knew that the store is so small, so demurely civilized that it almost never has the book I am looking for (not even when I was looking for Jonathan Franzen's collection of essays which features - on the cover! - a photo of a woman standing in Three Lives reading), and there was little chance that it would have George Steiner's book, The Uncommon Reader. The real reason that I was there was that stopping by a bookstore on the way home seemed like a special privilege, a way of turning the inevitable commute into a late afternoon stroll. As it turned out, Three Lives did not have the book I was looking for, or even the other book I was looking for, or even the new reissue of Eichmann in Jerusalem that I'd considered buying when I saw it there only a few weeks ago laid out neatly next to the other attractively packaged volumes in the Penguin “Great Ideas” series. I thought about buying a book by Orhan Pamuk and then felt embarrassed about being a part of the Nobel Prize-winner's "bump" in sales. I ended up reading E.L. Doctorow's new book, The Creationists – his short essay on Dos Passos. I was thinking about the opening of U.S.A. when I heard a man yelling. What was he saying? The word I heard was that unprintable, unmentionable word that one seems to hear all the time, on the street, on the radio, in movies, apparently stripped of its earlier violence. He shouted it again. The doors of the tiny bookstore had been left wide open to the street, inviting in passersby. As the man walked past the open door, I saw his face clearly, though all I remember now was that he was old and white, and did not look especially insane. He was dressed in a puffy winter coat and was carrying what looked like a laundry bag. I looked around. The woman who had told me a few minutes earlier that the store could “special order” the Steiner book was standing nearby, nervously facing the same direction. I tried to go back to reading the essay, back to Dos Passos, back to my admiration not only for his work, but for the life of the author, his ambition and productivity and commitment to putting himself in the center of the action, but then I heard the man's voice again, and I could not read another word. What would Dos Passos do? I had just been reading about the Spanish Civil War, about Hemingway and Dos Passos splitting over the murder of José Robles. I thought that I should walk over and punch the man in the face. This seemed like the brave act of principle until I reminded myself how little courage it would take to hit an old man. I could not tell if he was talking to anyone in particular. Whose defense would I come to? "You filthy, no good n-----." I couldn’t see the old man any more but I could still feel his presence. I listened for a response, waiting for some evidence of a victim, some sign to tell me how to act. Was reading cowardice? A young, pretty mother walked past the open doors holding her daughter's hand. The girl said something I couldn't hear, and then the mother who was like so many mothers in the neighborhood – finely dressed, composed, and well-married – said to her daughter, "Well, I don't like that word either." The wind picked up, colder than anyone had expected it to be. I couldn’t hear the man’s voice any longer. The store clerk went back to the cash register. I looked back down at the book that was still in my hands, unable to think of any surer response than this.

The Possibilities Are Endless

You write a story, but no one likes it. You write a story that people like, but you don't get into intro. creative writing. You take creative writing in college, but discover a consuming love of Scotch upon graduation. You don't have a drinking problem, but you demonstrate an interest in paying the rent every month, so you get a steady job. Your steady job doesn't take up all your time, but you develop a strong loyalty to a number of television programs. TV doesn't interest you, but your other hobbies (e.g., hiking the Adirondacks, teaching skeet shooting to youngsters, and COBOL programming) all prove much more gratifying and rewarding in the long-term. Writing stories continues to be a pastime, but you can't imagine how you'd ever quit your job to go back to school. You apply to MFA programs, but you don't get in. You get in, but you aren't awarded any scholarship money. You get a scholarship, quit your job, and move across the country for grad school, but your work is mocked and derided by your professors. Your professors say nice things, but your submissions are torn ball from socket by your fellow students in workshop like a gang of nicotine-starved hyenas. Your work is steady and good and admired, but you find that, once having tapped the well of adventures of a bitter teenager railing against distracted parents who don't understand, all funneled into a small sheaf of angry, pseudoautobiographical sketches, you never manage the stamina to write more than the first seventy pages of a novel. You complete a story collection and a solid five hundred pages of a novel, but then you're married and the first kid comes along and there's that thirty-year fixed-rate and diapers and a college fund and a revived enthusiasm for vermouth and who has the time? You write your story collection and your bildungsroman, but you have no idea where to send them. You send writing samples to a number of agents, but they all send polite rejections back saying they're not smitten with the work and anyway this is a tough time for story collections. You find an agent who loves your work and wants to represent you but after a while phone calls go unreturned and letters unanswered and eventually he turns up in Brazil, in hock, and addicted to yagé. Your agent sends your manuscript out to a number of presses, but they all gently decline, saying they're not sold on the work and anyway this is a rough season for bildungsromans. Your agent goes down the publishers, rung by reputation rung, until your book is picked up by a small outfit based in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, but your first print run is only three hundred units, all flimsy and curly and print-on-demand, and none get sent to reviewers, and the only distribution this outfit has, you notice, apparently due to a small arbitration case or two and perhaps a few other various contractual contretemps, is from its own website. Your agent sells your manuscript to a respected New York publisher, but your editor is fired before your book's pub date and no one else at the house ever picks it up and your words are consigned to the oblivion of the remainder bin. Your first book comes out and is championed by your publisher but PW, Kirkus, and Library Journal all trash it. Your first book is loved by the trades but Michiko Kakutani guts it with a strange, metaphorical meat cleaver. Janet Maslin calls your writing the new sliced bread, but the book never gets legs and the large print run of the paperback gets whacked by returns. Everyone loves your first book so much that your days are filled with praise and your nights with unceasing debauchery, but when the dust settles you find that you're done, you've had your say, that was it, and you never write a second. You almost finish your second book but one morning while you're out getting coffee your house burns to the ground, the only copy of the only draft of your manuscript inside it. Your second book is lousy. You're proud of your second book but it's universally eviscerated, said to suffer from an inoperable case of sophomore slump. Your first two books do so poorly commercially that you're forced to begin your career all over again under a pseudonym. After your second book and first marriage you decide to throw in the towel and go to law school. After your third book and second spouse and first disappointing film adaptation you channel all your energy into teaching undergrads. After your fourth book and third affair with a former student and second arrest for public déshabillé and first libel suit you move to a remote region of New England, utterly disgusted with the phoniness of the world and determined to withdraw from it forever. After your fifth book and fourth conversion to Catholicism and third stay at McLean Hospital and second Pulitzer and first failed run for office you find you simply have little interest in anything other than angry letters to the editor and herb gardening and that old flame, come back to love you once more, schnapps, sweet schnapps. After winning the Nobel prize for literature you are cursed, damned, as so many claim to have been before you, and you never write another word you're happy with again.