Aiming vs. wandering

Oppressive weather, oppressive politics. Sometimes it’s hard to see a way forward, with billionaires controlling the show and the current government chipping away at the integrity of a voting system that was flawed to start with.

My spouse remains an energetic activist anyway. In addition to writing for local and regional newspapers, he’s been making and posting on Facebook simple graphics based on legal verdicts that go against Trump. No AI, just PDFs, with some cut-and-paste of the key parts and strategic underlining. (We think he’s the only Chris Gavaler in the world and therefore not hard to look up, if you want to. He’s also a literary writer, digital artist, and comics scholar.) Typically his posts get 20-30 likes, ordinary person numbers. FB has branded him a “digital creator,” though–not a label he sought or even knew existed before–and occasionally, mysteriously, the algorithm kicks him up into the hundreds or higher. Recently a post about an Epstein-related verdict (graphic above) went seriously viral: pushing 18K likes, more than half a million views. I know there are public figures for whom those stats would be chicken feed, but compared to how poets do out there: just, wow.

We laugh about the randomness but are glad he’s reaching people. I also wonder how I’d feel if a significantly less urgent cause–my social media efforts on behalf of my writing–hit big numbers. The trolls would upset me more than they bother Chris, for sure.

I say “efforts,” and social media often feels like work, but I’m not especially good at it or committed to it. When somebody is kind enough to publish me or host me for an event, I post my little heart out, feeling indebted. I feel proud of those accomplishments, too, although given my gendered training in modest deportment, I wince at admitting it. Yet when it comes to adding music to one of those Instagram posts, researching how to improve my reach, or even checking in often enough that the algorithm likes me, I give up before I get started.

I am very serious and ambitious about writing the best poetry and prose I can, by my own standards. Creating appealing posts and the occasional newsletter? My confidence fails and I can’t consistently fake otherwise. When I submit work for publication, that’s a way of saying, “This is worth your attention.” Social media is a version of the same–not a bad message for a writer to put out there–yet ambivalence plagues me. It’s laziness, embarrassment, a preference other kinds of work, a long to-do list, a sense of being undeserving, disliking the necessary selfies and performance of cheer, frustration in advance at the difficulty of attracting eyeballs, and, as I’m occasionally wise enough to realize, avoidance of what fragments attention.

Studying and teaching the poetry of a century ago hasn’t resolved my mixed feelings. Those poets’ success in their own era had everything to do with connections forged in big cities and at prestigious universities–still primary venues to success, obviously. Glamor, charisma, and good looks helped some modernists, too, even without social media to amplify those assets. Having a big readership or critical acclaim has never been entirely rooted in the quality of the work. Time remedies some of that unfairness, but it’s a slow, imperfect process, never mind the unforeseeable ways some writing ages better than others. Modernists taught us how to read their poetry, after all, and exerted a huge influence on literary values for decades after, shaping what people thought was good. It takes heroic effort just to find the strong work that escaped notice in its day, not to mention figuring out how to argue on its behalf.

Popularity influences what gets written in the first place, too. Artists need varying degrees of contemporary encouragement and support to keep making art. One of my favorite Harlem Renaissance poets, Helene Johnson, won some awards but stopped playing the poetry career game before publishing a book, and only produced a slim volume’s worth of verse in her long lifetime–published posthumously. Social media might have helped her sustain literary connections once she left Harlem. I think it’s helped me, living in a small southern town. The internet generally has benefited me, too–what a gift to read literary magazines or samples of them freely online, compared to hunting out print copies in the occasional bookstore that carried them! But it can also demoralize me to insert myself into social media’s comparison machine. Not posting costs me; so does posting.

The past week of pondering why I do social media in this perversely semi-competent way has also brought three magazine rejections. No big deal, says the rational part of my brain–win some, lose some. Record the answers and delete the email; keep writing, a good thing to do even if I never find an audience for it. At the bottom of my awareness, though, runs a news ticker of self-questioning: are these poems lousy? Did the editors misjudge them? Did I misjudge those editors’ tastes? And bigger stuff: why didn’t my book make the shortlist? Where does it still have a chance? Wouldn’t it be pleasant to shut this downer of a news ticker down? Or does a writer who wants to connect with readers and listeners (I do) need to keep striving as well as withdrawing, aiming as well as wandering?

I’m obviously a little dispirited: the semiquincentennial blues, a mild bug that hit a week ago (or cyclosporiasis maybe), feeling confined by the extreme heat, in suspense about my novel under submission, other stuff. Nothing that would make for a compelling social media post. But last weekend’s “Poetry from the Underworld” workshop was lovely despite my bugginess (the wrong kind of virality). I was dazzled by the thoughtfulness, vulnerability, and artistic seriousness of everyone in the virtual room. Kudos to Sarah Ann Winn at Poet Camp for nurturing that space and inviting me to participate in it.

I’m also reading in a meandering way (see below) and spending days in the writing dream. Maybe that’s the best I can do: toggle between extended spans in each mode, knowing that I can’t manage wandering and aiming in rapid succession, even if others can. I have near-future plans to turn off my writing brain entirely, in fact, during a long weekend at the beach with family. Chris, the energetic writer-activist, will probably keep at it in the beach house, waking early to post with sand in his toes. More power to him and, while I never thought I’d praise the US legal system–also so deeply flawed–bless the lawyers and judges who fight the good fight.

*The top image is one of Chris’s: his version of Tarot’s shy High Priestess with a quote from my poem “Rhapsodomancy.” The Ecotone issue pictured with my sleep-stunned cat–named Vincent after the talented AND entrepreneurial poet Edna St. Vincent Millay–is terrific. I’m also reading knockout poetry by Annemarie Ní Churreáin and mysteries by P.D. James that star a poet-detective (she has an astonishing way of introducing characters with one or two lines of scathing description, among other talents). The Ginsberg photo is from a wonderful new collection, Ginsberg & Beat Fellows, by my retired colleague Gordon Ball. I can’t help but think of that photograph metaphorically: Allen Ginsberg is calmly adorned with success’s serpent; I’m more like skeptical, wary, but half-admiring Peter Orlovsky, looking on.