FAME IS THE SPUR—JOHN MILTON

They tell you if you write great poems
you will be lifted into the clouds—Denis Johnson

In my teens I was reading Louis Untermeyer’s fat anthology of English and American poets when I started writing myself and I got it into my head that I wanted to make poems good enough to be included in such an anthology in the future. Each poet in that book had an introduction which included a short biography and a discussion of some of the significant aspects of their work. These introductions were aimed at the general reader rather than at students and reading them I could sense the admiration that Untermeyer felt for his subjects. It made poetry seem important and the lives of poets meaningful and I suspect that, at a time when my identity was in flux, those introductions, as much as the poems themselves, were what got me hooked.

Later on, at Iowa, my teacher George Starbuck used to say that a poet has little idea which of his or her poems is going to catch on with a larger readership. The ones we invest the most time and effort in may not be among our best and we may overlook the ones that seemed to come too easily. Starbuck himself, a winner of the Yale Younger Poets Prize, was a witty formalist, working with double and triple meanings and trying to sound as hip as possible. He once wrote a poem to the acrostic “HOWARD MOSS IS SANTA CLAUSE,” and Howard Moss, who was then poetry editor of The New Yorker, published it, presumably without picking up on the joke. But for me, Starbuck’s most lasting poem is a sonnet called “For an American Burial.” Puns, though present, are kept to a minimum. The voice is somber and the only truly hip line in it is “Baby the sun goes up the sun goes down.” In a pop song that line would be forgettable, but in this beautifully crafted elegy it sings. I suspect, though, that the poem came too effortlessly for Starbuck to recognize its full value. It may be the one he was thinking of when he said you have no idea which of your poems will catch on with readers and last.

FOR AN AMERICAN BURIAL

Slowly out of the dusk-bedeviled air,
and off the passing blades of the gang plow
and suddenly in state, as here and now,
the earth gathers earth. The earth is fair;
all that the earth demands is the earth’s share;
all that we pervade and revel in and vow
never to lose, always to hold somehow,
we hold of earth, in temporary care.

Baby the sun goes up the sun goes down,
the roads turn into rivers under your wheels,
houses go spinning by, the lights of town
scatter and close, a galaxy unreels,
this endlessness, this readiness to drown,
this is the death he stood off, how it feels.

*

In my third year at Iowa, I was assigned to teach an introductory poetry writing course and one day a young man from the class came by the small office I shared with another teaching assistant. A new four story brick structure had replaced the legendary Quonset huts as home for the Writers Workshop, and the furniture, all bright and shiny, seemed more appropriate to junior executives at IBM, we thought, than to hot young writing prospects like ourselves.

After going over my student’s poems one by one, I told the him that I thought his work was impressive, especially for a freshman, a bit heavy on the adjectives perhaps, but well beyond what the other students in the class were doing.

“I know that,” he said, “but what I need you to tell me is—do I really have it? Can I make it as a writer?”

Although I’d had a few decent publications and the encouragement of my teachers, that same question hung in the air for me. I told him what I still believe, that becoming a writer hinges on making discoveries for yourself about language and also about yourself, breakthroughs call them, and nobody can tell you in advance when they will happen. Teachers can only try to assist the process.

But he restated his question. He mentioned that he’d grown up in Germany, Japan and Washington, D.C., and had only a slight connection to Iowa—an uncle on a farm somewhere. But he’d heard from this uncle that the university had a creative writing program and that’s why he’d come here: “I had to find out if I could make it as a writer.”

He ran a hand back through his hair and then sat still, tilted slightly forward, holding his breath and waiting for me to offer up a judgment. It seemed as though at that moment the wrong word might stop him cold and the right one launch him like an arrow arching over the cornfields into the bull’s eye of a Pulitzer Prize.

So I looked his poems over again. It would involve hard work, I told him, but I saw no reason to discourage him. “If you really want to write, you should keep at it, since it’s clear that you have some talent.” And with that key word, talent, I sensed his taut body relaxing, filling with massive relief. So I pushed the point a bit further: “If you have the ambition and stick to it,” I told him, “I don’t see why you can’t make it as a writer.”

His face flushed. “That’s really great to hear!” And grinning earnestly, Denis Johnson reached over to shake my hand, partly from gratitude, it seemed, but also to clinch the deal.

*

I only met Denis a few times after that semester, but he was always gracious and, even in later years, seemed to remembered with gratitude my encouragement at that key moment. Two years after taking my class, he published his first book, a poetry collection called The Man among the Seals. He was 20 and still an undergraduate, but he’d been admitted to courses in the graduate writing program because of his obvious talent. He went on to write nine novels, two books of short stories, including the widely acclaimed collection, Jesus’ Son, and three books of poetry. In 2007, he won the National Book Award for his novel, Tree of Smoke. He died too soon—in 2017—and was posthumously awarded the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction.

In the poem I quoted at the lead-in to this Substack, Johnson takes a darkly skeptical view of literary fame. Death, rather than fame, he asserts, is the ultimate force. But this bleak vision didn’t prevent him from having a productive and celebrated career. Here’s the poem:

There Are Trains Which Will Not Be Missed

They tell you if you write great poems
you will be lifted into the clouds
like a leaf which did not know

this was possible, you will never
hear of your darkness
again, it will become
distant while you become
holy, look,

they say, at the emptiness
of train tracks and it is poetry
growing up like flowers between
the ties, but those

who say this
are not in control of themselves
or of anything and they must

lie to you in order
that they may at night not bear witness
to such great distances cascading and such

eternities unwinding
around them as to cause even the most powerful
of beds to become silences, it

is death which continues
over these chasms and these
distances deliberately like a train.