Chimera Song Mosaic
Friday, June 13, 2003
Accidents happen all the time. It could happen. It’s what you do with today, so aptly put, “The first day of the rest of your life,” that’s important. Also, if you happen to get more than one day, you should continue to do stuff that’s important to you, such as napping or raising butterflies or lobbying the school boards for a real sex ed course in the public schools. It could be poetry.
Where Do Poets Go When They Die?
Let me first get this out of the way: I am not a person who subscribes to the idea of live fast, die young, leave a beautiful corpse, or only the good die young, or any of those verbal inanities that serve to help explain (in a superstitious way) why so many of our wonderful and talented celebrities and writers (not that a writer cannot be a celebrity, but how many writer-divas do you know who demand that their rooms be scented with gardenias or that only the color white be present or that the sheets are of a particular thread count or that there are only so many M&Ms in the bowl of a particular color? Hey, if you’ve got names, send them in; I love the chisme) die young. Some who have: Janis Joplin (27). Martin Luther King, Jr. (39). River Phoenix (23). Pedro Infante (40). Sylvia Plath (30). John Keats (26). Che Guevara (39). Flannery O’ Conner (39). Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (36). (I am not going to continue this list ad nauseam.)
As a way of offering some random sampling evidence as proof that the good, in fact, do not always die young, I will offer: Nina Simone (70--I love you, Nina! “Gimme a Pigfoot!”). Mother Teresa (87--Whose death was shamefully overshadowed by Princess Diana’s in the same year, within months of each other. C’mon, world, do we really love Lady Di more than Is-She-A-Saint-Yet-Mama-Tére?). Charles Darwin (72). Donatien Alphonse Francois de Sade (74). Mahatma Gandhi (79). Waylon Jennings (64). Sigmund Freud (95). Karl Marx (65). Antonio Saleiri (75). Ted Hughes (68).
Now I know some of you had to be impressed by the Grand Triumvirate of Western Thought (Siggie and the two Chucks were all I learned as an undergrad). But if you still don’t believe me, ponder this: why wouldn’t someone only get better as they got older? Sure, the physical stuff goes down hill pretty fast after 50 (not 30, you rabid cult of youth types), but the mind, in most cases, stays strong longer than the reproductive systems that allow wealthy octogenarians to impregnate their 20-something, former porn star wives. If you are good at something in your youth, it stands to reason that you would improve as you get more practice, restricted only by the limits of the body.
But there’s more to it than that. If you just look around, you notice that most musicians, for example, don’t stay in the game much past 40, or even 30. Why not? Do they just not have the passion, the motivation to prove themselves anymore? Even eminem is already thinking about this impending expiration date: “[W]hen it's all said and done I'll be 40 / Before I know it with a 40 on the porch telling stories / With a bottle of Jack / Two grandkids in my lap” (“Drug Ballad,” The Marshall Mathers LP). Something like 70% of public school teachers leave their profession within 3 years; from my best estimate, the average life of a weblog is 3 months (unless I am reading the achieves wrong). How long do poets last?
I think the desire to prove one’s self accounts for a lot of the productivity of the young. Also they are buying into the bogus American work ethic, thinking it will lead them to the comfortable life that their parents enjoyed. But that doesn’t account for so many people jumping ship on creativity (or maybe it does—maybe they actually want to make money (the poets, not the rock stars) and that’s why they stop being poets). Also people get burned out. Also people get bored and want to pursue other interests. The fans may be willing to consume album after album of the same kinds of tunes, but the creator may no longer be interested in creating them. I think the creators burn out on their own genius before the fans do.
But to me the most salient factor is motivation to prove one’s self. I caught myself thinking the other day that if only I could prove myself (by publishing one book of poetry, perhaps—my goals aren’t that high), I could just sit back and rest on my laurels, as it were, content in the knowledge that I am a good poet, just as I always wanted to be. But I shocked myself with this blatant complacency—how un-American! (Or maybe it is very American, as the case may be.) If I know going into this that my intentions are less than pure, perhaps I shouldn’t bother. How would it really change me? Wouldn’t it just lead me to expect even more out of myself—more poems, more books, more stories, some essays, some criticism, even a novel? Wouldn’t I just be extra disappointed if, after accomplishing something, I decided that I no longer wanted to write?
How many more poems does a person have left in him or her anyway?
Jordan Davis’s Million Poems Journal and Jim Behrle’s efforts are encouraging, and I should know better at this point than to even ask that question, but when I see how many people bow out of music early, I can’t help but wonder if the same happens with poetry. Writing a poem once a month is easy. Writing poetry everyday is hard. Writing blogs is hard, but it is a lot easier than writing poetry. I don’t have to be good at blogging (I tell myself).
Okay, so if I buy the idea that a person can keep writing poetry as long as he or she wants to write, then my answer is easy. But I don’t think this is an easy question. Another easy answer is, “Good! Get lost! We have too many poets anyway,” which I think has some truth to it. But people are motivated by praise and acknowledgement, and praise and acknowledgement also invite pressure and high expectations. Perhaps the question of whether someone stays in or bails out has much more to do with praise and acknowledgement than we would like to admit. Could we be so tenuous?
The second issue, of course, is whether or not you happen to die young, or die late. These people who die young can never truly factor into this argument because their deaths cruelly (or blessedly) prevent them from asking these questions: Am I really this good? Will I always be this good? Or maybe they ask these questions but don’t have time to form an answer—or at least don’t have to deal with these questions and self doubts while they are approaching the euphemistically named golden years and are increasingly denigrated by our society (not all world societies, but our society).
They might instead ask this question: Will I be remembered? And the answer to that comes swift but without their personal recognition after they meet their untimely deaths. It is very pretty and romantic to think that Sylvia Plath and John Keats would have produced the world’s best poetry if only they had lived a bit longer; it is also very pretty and romantic to think that they died at precisely the right time, before oppressive doubt and lack of motivation could cripple their creativity and work ethic. They did not receive acknowledgement worthy of their art in their time (another saying tells us that they never do), but they received enough to continue to be passionate, inventive, motivated—even while greatly suffering personal disappointments and emotional oppressions (and physical/mental degeneration). And when it got to the worst part, they were no longer writing (poems), and then their lives ended (Plath’s by her own hand as everyone is so quick to point to in effort to feed the myth of the psychotic genius, which I don’t buy, but I won’t explore that theory now), and they then were no doubt catapulted into notice because of the sensational particulars of their deaths (Keats suffered from and finally succumbed to the tuberculosis he took in while nursing his dying brother). What would Plath be writing today, had she survived that depression and she were still alive? What would Keats have accomplished in his lifetime, adding 50 years to his skinny 26? We will never know the answers to these questions because the good who die young can offer no explanation or insight into this burden transferred onto those who survive. Also, we are disheartened to think that the answer might be nothing.
Those who died young have nothing to prove; those who died at a ripe age had their chance to prove it. (Those who died young had their chance, their only chance—perhaps that is yet another reason why the young are so full of piss & vinegar.) Those who are still around and are making their art are constantly proving themselves—it is a ritual that must be repeated but a cycle that must not be circular in its sameness to itself; we must prove ourselves over again, but this time do it differently. A stagnant artist is a woeful sight and pleases the mind even less.
Perhaps when poets die to poetry (if they ever do), they move on to stories, blogs, criticism, teaching, novels, film, humanitarian efforts—and this is like that hydrophilic, fully permeable membrane that works both ways. A novelist could turn into a poet.
I could have been a scientist. But I did not. I am a poet, and I don’t plan to leave anything physical of me that hasn’t been well used during my lifetime. Sterile, arthritic, doddering, bony, and soft—that’s the corpse I hope I am lucky enough to leave. And I can’t provide accurate maps as to what’s in between. I hope it has something to do with poetry.
Finally, an appeal to logic: the good do not die young—or to put it better, the good are not any more likely to die young than the “bad.” The young do not die because they are good—that’s faulty causality/hasty generalization. Some of the good die young for the same reason that everybody dies: disease, malnutrition, heartache, suicide, murder, accident, accident, accident. When we try to apply a pattern to it or a reason for it—that’s hypothesis contrary to the fact.
This is what it’s going to be like when I die; I am going to be just like Ol’ Hannah Brown: “Send me, Daddy, ‘cause I don’t care”:
“Gimme a Pigfoot (And a Bottle of Beer)”
Up in Harlem on a Saturday night
Were the highbrows get together, it's just to tight
We all gather at the Harlem Strut
And what we do is tut tut tut
Ol' Hannah Brown, from way cross town
Keeps drinking her liquor and she brings them down
Just at the break of day
You could hear old Hannah say
I wanna pigfoot and a bottle of beer
Send me daddy, cos I don't care
I feel just like I wanna clown
Give the piano player a drink
Cause he brought me down
He just send me right off to sleep
Check all your razors and your guns
I'm gonna be arrested when the wagon comes
I wanna pigfoot and a bottle of beer
Send me cos I don't care oh no
Send me cos I don't care
I wanna pigfoot and a bottle of beer
Send me daddy, cos I don't care
I feel just like I wanna clown
Give the piano player a drink
Cause he brought me down
He's got rhythm when he stomps his feet
He moves me right off to sleep
Check all your razors check your guns
I'm gonna be arrested when the wagon comes
I wanna pigfoot and a bottle of beer
Send me cos I don't care oh no
Send me cos I don't care
Written by Wesley "Sox" Wilson in 1933 for Bessie Smith. Subsequently covered by Billie Holiday in 1949 (but I like to hear Nina Simone sing it).
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