The title caught me immediately as I was going through the voluminous AWP conference program earlier this year: “Literary Fame: Should We Strive For It? Should We Care About It?” It definitely got to the essence of a topic that’s been close to me since I first saw myself as a writer, many, many years ago back in elementary school. The description of the discussion is potent: “Literary fame is not something most writers confess to seeking, but it often lurks in the background of our work. Is fame even worth pursuing? Does seeking fame warp us as writers, as human beings, or as members of a literary community? Or is the quest for recognition a motivator that keep us active and sharp? How much renown is enough? Four writers reflect on how they handle the desire for fame, and whether they find it most useful to cultivate it or to remain aloof from it.”
Their discussion did not disappoint; I’m still thinking about the conversation. The participants—Zack Rogow, Dion O’Reilly, Richard Blanco, Cornelius Eady—let me record the proceedings. Eady wasn’t able to be present due to an emergency, but joined via video with an essay and poem. We’re happy we can present both to you below. Thursday we’re offering an edited version of the panel. Let us know on social media (Meta, X, Tiktok) what you think.
—S.L. Wisenberg, ACM editor
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I wonder if we are actually confusing or conflating Fame with Ambition, something every writer is “guilty” of—or Envy, an author’s evil, invisible “Harvey” that has sat in and spoiled a few judging panels in my day—or simple Jealousy, which I’ve seen curdle many an otherwise gentle soul.
Add to this the uncomfortable fact that these feelings and actions sometimes spring not out of a sense of FOMO—Fear of Missing Out—but because there is something about the sex or race or class of the person who “wins” that can’t be abided—as I’ve seen and heard and sometimes lived through in my writing career. I decided to use some lines from David Bowie’s song “Fame” to help frame my thoughts:
1) I reject you first
I’m thinking now of one of my early mentors, the late poet Shreela Ray, who arrived from India, attended and graduated from the Iowa Writers Workshop loaded with brains, beauty, lyric surety, a grounding in the English Literary Tradition only to see her first (and only) book of poems be disqualified for consideration for a National Book Award on the grounds that she wasn’t an “American” (she was married to an American by this point, with a kid, and held legal status). It was a wound and a lesson I believe she never fully recovered from, and it stung all the more because Shreela wanted Fame. She had come to the States seeking—and expecting—to be seen, considered, and welcomed to the American table. The poems were ready, but the idea of the skin, sex, ambition and race of the writer at that moment in the late 1970s ground her career to a halt.
I also am reminded of Robert Lowell and Anthony Hecht, two poets whose instant fame (both winning the Pulitzer for their first books)—and the pressure for the second book—didn’t do their lives and relationships any favors. Sometimes, winning turns Fame from a puppy into a pit bull.
I know this story because Lowell and Hecht—in the circles I run in—are famous. We know not only the work but the gossip, because we want to know what drove, nagged and haunted them as they wrote. The more we think we know, the closer we think we feel we are to their work. Some writers, especially. as they start the work of becoming, sometimes also view these stories as a roadmap, or a way to measure themselves as they develop, or as an end goal—this way to the bitter candy. Most of you don’t know Shreela’s story because again, in those circles—she isn’t. And what would have happened, or changed, I’ve sometimes wondered, if she had won that NBA? We would know at least that. We would have remembered her because that would have been one of those “controversy years” that would have challenged the status quo of that decade. It may have pushed some “progressives” to say things they didn’t know was stuck under their tongues. Perhaps some of the focus on remembering her now would have focused on those “troubles,” and what it all meant. Others of us would gather up the small sticks of her quick life and add it to the wild bonfire of where and who we are now. What we miss for certain is a fine clutch of poems written from the POV of a keen mind that couldn’t quite figure the magic trick of landing intact, a POC in 1970s American Literary Culture. But it wasn’t from a lack of trying.
2) It’s not your brain, it’s just the flame
And as for me: Am I a famous poet? I know I’ve been ambitious—which is how I wind up taping this. I know I’ve had a noted career—I know that I’m the most famous poetry student of Patricia Janus, Johanna Mason and Sheela Ray, three women who never met in life but who met me and helped to shift my young life to this. Johanna was the home-room teacher who didn’t scoff at the half-baked lines I let her read, Shreela died way too young at the age of 50, and Pat, who led the first workshop I ever attended—and whose teaching style I pinched a long time ago—actually walked away from a very promising career as a poet. She had placed work in the Atlantic and the American Poetry Review—two publications I’ve yet to crack to this day—because at a certain moment in her life she felt training to becoming a nurse was a much better way to spend her time on earth than setting the poetry world ablaze. From what I hear, she never stopped writing, but she never regretted her choice. It may have been her last, best lesson to her old poetry student.
Poetry is an art; art is made by humans, and humans are messy. I feel there may be an underlining premise to some of these questions that Fame in and of itself curdles and corrupts all artists—Bob Dylan slipping on dark glasses at the Newport Folk Festival and plugging in to the American Jackpot—but I feel that insinuation jumps over the poets I know who have used Fame as an activist tool and weapon—June Jordan, Elizabeth Alexander, Mahogany Brown, Tyehimba Jess, just to name a few of many. Perhaps the real question is if the poet is lucky or crafty or ruthless enough to grab and hold it, what do they do with it? And who do they owe?
3) What you need you have to borrow
Do you need to be a good person in order to be a great poet? History says absolutely not, but my wish for the students I work with is that they come to the conclusion that they don’t need to be a heartbreaker asshole in order for their verse to live forever. I hope hanging a few months with me might make them aware of another model, a slightly different way to do it. I say this knowing that the odds these days aren’t with me—the present MFA model has added what I feel to be a new element, at least one I can’t recall being to this degree ever; for the first time, a student can’t “relax” on their journey to finding their voice; they need to learn the craft, and they need to learn the business before they leave their program. They now feel they need to make a mark before they leave—an award, a publication—if they have any chance of being taken seriously out there. We have somehow taken an art that relies on contemplation and tied the learning of it to a punch clock.
On the first day of a workshop—especially a Graduate Workshop—I, the slightly rumpled but tenured OG in the room, usually tell my students two things: 1) Your ambition plunked you down at that table, in that chair. Congrats! Nothing “evil” about trying to figure out what makes your voice tick best, and 2) the moment you set off on that path—a book someone lent you, a reading that knocked you out—and you reached for a pen or keyboard in response, you entered a conversation with Literature, the voices, living and dead that you want to talk back and add to.
Though these days, I could just as easily replace “competition” for “conversation.”
The bare-bones mission of the poet, I think, their “prime directive” as I sometimes jokingly put it, is to watch, listen, read and get it down—whatever “it” is that nags and drives the poet. The rest is a fate we sometimes think we can control, but we will certainly write. I like to think that’s fuel enough for a well-lived life, but if I truly did, I never would have left my hometown of Rochester, NY, behind in my twenties.
I’ll close with the last poem in my second book, Victims of the Latest Dance Craze, where I’m clearly wondering about the limits of Literary Fame—especially for people like myself. I’d just won an award for the book, and everyone was telling me how my life was about to change—and it did—but the poetry stacks at the Amherst Public Library in Virginia was also reminding me not so much, not so fast: it reminds me now of a fractured Ars Poetica—something scratched out on a wall by Kilroy’s knife. And we all know who he is, right?
Dance at the Amherst County Public Library
Fellow poets,
My Brothers and Sisters,
Comrades,
Distinguished guests and visitors,
Yes,
Even the tourists
In their T-shirts and mirrored sunglasses.
Before our attention begins to wander
Let me ask this:
In one hundred years,
No,
Say fifty years,
If, through grand design or fluke
The world still stands
And leads our descendants to this branch library in Amherst, VA,
Which poets would they find on the shelves?
The answer probably is
They will only find
What I found this afternoon:
Shakespeare
And Paul Laurence Dunbar.
In view of
And in spite of this awful truth
I would still like to leave one or two thoughts behind:
If you are an archaeologist and find these items in Mr. Dunbar’s
Collected Works:
This poem,
A pair of red laces
Please understand that this was how I defined myself,
A dancing fool who couldn’t stay away from words
Even though they brought me nothing but difficulties.
I was better when I danced,
The language of the body so much cleaner.
I was always in jealous awe of the dancers,
Who seemed, to me at least, to be honest animals.
When I danced
I imagined myself a woman,
Because there is no sight more lovely
Than a woman kicking her heels up in a dive.
This is how I wasted my time,
Trying to become the Henry Ford of poetry,
And mass produce a group of words
Into a thing which could shake
And be owned by the entire world.
Naturally, I failed.
Of course, even the failure was a sort of dance.
My friend,
I bequeath to you what I know:
Not the image of a high, glistening city
But the potential in tall grass, flattened
By a summer’s storm.
Not the dance
But the good intentions of a dance.
This was the world I belonged to,
With its symphony of near-misses,
And in its name
And in the names of all those omitted
I dance my small graffiti dance.
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Poet / Playwright / Songwriter Cornelius Eady was born in Rochester, NY in 1954, and is the author of several poetry collections: Kartunes; Victims of the Latest Dance Craze, winner of the 1985 Lamont Prize; The Gathering of My Name, nominated for the 1992 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry; You Don’t Miss Your Water; The Autobiography of a Jukebox; Brutal Imagination; and most recently, Hardheaded Weather. His awards include Fellowships from the NEA, the Guggenheim Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, a Lila Wallace / Reader’s Digest Traveling Scholarship, and The Prairie Schooner Strousse Award. His work appears in many journals, magazines, and the anthologies Every Shut Eye Ain’t Asleep, In Search of Color Everywhere, and The Vintage Anthology of African American Poetry, 1750-2000. He is co-founder of Cave Canem, and is currently the Hodges Chair in Excellence in the English Department at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
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Mia Broecke is fifteen years old. Half-Belgian, half-English, she lives in Fourqueux, France. She paints in her free time and her art has previously appeared in the North American Review and Reed Magazine.
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