"it's not you, it's me": the Anxiety of Influence(lessness)
"No crowd that has occurred / Exhibit, I suppose, / The general attendance / That Resurrection does."
Greetings. Dropping by for the first time this year to observe and acknowledge that I’m on a break from this platform while I finish my manuscript of criticism, complete my PhD program, and open up to what's next for my writing life. Social media has never been where I place much care, attention, energy, being basically performative; and I am more private than exhibitionistic in my writing practices and preferences these days. My mentorship packages offer access to my time and energy in "teaching mode." For now, my publishing of poetry is limited to chapbooks that I distribute personally, and the occasional poem in a magazine -- Perennial has one forthcoming this season, a poem about cherrypicking (the literal kind) called "Freedom."
I dream of finding a place to publish my revised dissertation manuscript in the next few years, but since the audience falls somewhere between 'academic' and 'public' (and since I can't tell the future) I'm not sure how that will happen. I've considered publishing excerpts of it on this platform, but I don't see the point. To be honest, I don't see the point of continuing to use this platform at all, as I am in a phase of my writing life that feels volatile and fresh. Instead of exposing raw work too soon, if I were to cherrypick (not the literal way) poems and nonfiction from my archive and drip that content here, it would be boring for me, and I would want it all to have been published elsewhere first. For whatever reason, Substack to me seems like the wrong place for any of my real writing to show up in the world right now.
When I was a humanities undergraduate at Berkeley, I had a particularly prolific period in the winter and spring of my third year: I opened a Blogspot account and typed a first draft of a poem (sometimes two) into a new post every morning for eighty days. I remember a friend of mine shaking his head at me, marveling at my apparent ignorance of internet etiquette. Not only did he find it foolish that I published original work online to be stolen, but he also found it shocking that I would publish first drafts ‘for all the world to see.' I couldn't care less about the latter, and the former couldn't seriously worry me -- after all, who was looking at my Blogspot? They shut down my page at some point (I had already pulled all eighty poems from the blog and pasted them into Word documents for revision and safekeeping) and I haven't been able to find it with the Wayback Machine. I'm getting off on a tangent…
I am reading through an anthology of female-authored memoirs right now, a Penguin Book of [20th-century] Women's Lives that came out in the 1990s. Notable excerpts (for me) so far have been reacquaintances with Colette, Isak Dinesen, and Anne Frank, and new acquaintance with Jill Ker Conway and Eleanor Coppola. Some of these women intended for their journals and diaries to be published, and some did not. I think Substack has become just another sounding-off place and I don't know if I want to be heard in this way, on this line. I don't know how I want to be heard or whether I do at all, where I am right now, kicking up a lot of dust with the first draft of this literary critical project, and assembling to publish independently a connected series of poetry manuscripts. Since I don't really see where Substack can serve my mission right now, I have stopped using it much, and I can't say I know when or if I'll be back. I hope my previous posts have been interesting and useful for some people, and I'm glad to leave them up in the hopes that someone will come to them and find new and heartening information inside. But I think it would be just as well if I put them on my website as an archive of my own, instead of on Substack. Would there be any difference? The vibe is starting to get very 'slush pile.'
When I started out a few years ago, the point of my Substack was the same as the point of the erstwhile Blogspot -- a place to stash daily or regular dashed-off writings that happened to be public. The first rash of posts reflects that. Then my goal shifted, and I wanted to try to drive people to my website, to convert readers and subscribers into clients for my nascent writing mentorship business. So my posts became little proofs of quality, examples of what you could expect if you chose to hire me to guide your journey of artistic discovery/recovery. My 'About Me' page reflects that; and so I wrote about esoteric systems for self-understanding and I wrote about bodywork and energy work for healing trauma and I wrote about the ritual and social uses of poetry and New Age spirituality for ‘personal transformation,’ all of which helped me get a handle on the pedagogy angle of my dissertation, oriented towards non-academics as it's been.
I had been made a teacher (a public profession) over the last decade by dint of wanting to be a writer but needing cash. I understand my interpersonal/relational gift to be more a capacity for 'guidance' than 'teaching.' This is a separate vocation from writing, which for me is private. I experience very little overlap in these roles.
I'm not a journalist, and I don’t give pride of place to social science in my prose. I don't know if there's a huge difference between cultural criticism and researched hot takes (Substack seems to be the place for these things). Either way, I am (and only ever always was) a poet. I am in the midst of wrangling my first ever complete piece of criticism; but I don't identify, writerly-ly, as a critic. My dissertation is a criticism of criticism, as these things usually are, and I am confident that the degraded sheer-neglect expectations at my public university combined with the strung-out 'state of the art' of the humanities everywhere will guarantee that what I write cannot 'matter' the way that I used to think I wanted, that acknowledged, celebrated, status-quo-inducing influence I was conditioned to desire... instead I now know that I am writing a book for myself and three indulgent professors, and my mother and my best friend, and the very few others who have expressed genuine interest in the final product (Fran, for example, my father's art teacher in the Western Cape, who I met at the farmer's market last weekend).
I am satisfied that no one else will care about what I wrote, am writing, about John Ashbery's mystical New Age pedagogy. Am I getting old, getting real, or just getting to the end of the project? I don't give a fuck if anyone sees it or not.
I was affectedly devil-may-care about my MFA thesis, I recall, in part because I had let them get to me, and therefore I was ashamed of my work and myself. That was a real cruelty on the part of that program and its self-absorbed, childish faculty. I know enough people with similar stories that I won't repeat any of that now; but I am writing about my relationship to my audience, and that was a case where I was pied in the face (by my 'equals' and 'betters') for being myself; it seemed comic at the time, but left a scar. My audience then was the faculty, and they rejected me, much like my cohort when they never 'got' me in workshop. I let that misunderstanding sink into me like poison, and even the loyalty of a fierce and exceptional mentor could not protect me from my own historical fears of lovelessness. I retracted tightly into myself after that experience, and have not come out since.
Substack has been an example, like my presence on Instagram was, of affecting that 'devil-may-care' attitude about public-facing art, about sharing of myself, about the will to belong and be accepted by a group. But it has never given me any sense of audience, because I have never shared what I know to be my true work on this platform. I have used it as a diary and a teaching tool and a marketing scheme. It is the only form of social media I use anymore, and I don't use it very well. Social media (the way I've used it, apparently, anyway) is a fun-house mirror; it is dysmorphic, solipsistic; it can't afford an actual audience. It may be that this is because the bulk of the work I have to share does not have a place in the world yet, is not "finished," and so I cannot just use this to link to my books or my readings or my interviews or my articles elsewhere, and influence thereby... my poems in particular don't exist in the public sphere yet. Only shreds of me are out there, archived in humble online lit mags, one old poem at a time, a number of them already lost to expired domains. Nobody reads those things, which is okay. But it's a weird feeling to want to share, to think you want to share, and to see modes of sharing that have become ubiquitous, and that don't work to accomplish what sharing is meant to accomplish -- bringing people together. Get offline, I know, I know, and I will, and I am. I'm just writing about it here, in a weird tradition of self-disclosure. Per Emily Dickinson:
I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you – Nobody – too?
Then there’s a pair of us!
Don’t tell! they’d advertise – you know!How dreary – to be – Somebody!
How public – like a Frog –
To tell one’s name – the livelong June –
To an admiring Bog!
So, I don't feel like my online presence makes any sense, I don't know how to connect with readers on this platform, I don't know how to sell hours. I do know it doesn't feel right to publish poetry here, or excerpts from any of my unpublished manuscripts, poetry or nonfiction or criticism. I am at the wrong point in my career to be using Substack, I think. I have a lot of writing still to do that goes deliberately unseen... I'm not interested in becoming a critic professionally. I don't think "writing professionally" makes any sense. Like I said, I'm a poet. We are rarely managerial types. If I had Bob Hass' tenure seat and Pulitzer, I'd have agents and editors and assistants to manage me who'd make me professional. (Part of me hopes against the prevailing awareness that it's stolen and evil that I have all of that someday.)
Bob's classes were among my favorite at Berkeley, and his office hours among my most beloved for their encouragement. He was quite sardonic in our final one, when he asked me, after I told him I was going to apply for PhDs, whether I was genuinely interested in learning to write critical prose. He seemed bemused (he often seemed bemused; he is a Pisces), but charmed by my conviction. Like the MFA, it was always something I was gonna have to do.
None of my mentors supported my going out for the PhD because they knew what awaited me in academia. I'm still glad I did it -- I know the ink's not dry yet, but you can't jinx Fate -- because if I hadn't seen firsthand just how bad the situation was, gotten involved with the unions, the strikes, the brainwashing, I might be tempted to be jealous. I like crossing things off the list. My champions also feared that my creativity would be damaged or dry up by the system -- both those who discouraged the MFA and those who discouraged the PhD feared for the life of my poetry. But I needed eyes on my work, and in my twenties, I lacked the courage and open-mindedness to seek cohorts of my own. I was snobby and insecure and loved school; only an elite audience would do for 'my' 'work.' I have had that snobbishness starved out of me by now, and found that kind of insecurity impractical to my needs. I no longer harbor illusions about the intellectual superiority of the higher-educated, because I've met a bunch of them, and simultaneously (thanks to vanlife and expatriation) met outsiders, and had plenty of time to compare.
Of course I decided or realized I was an outsider while I was on the inside, and of course I deem myself among the covert downtrodden intelligent, and imagine that with submission of my monograph I cast pearls of ideas before ideological swine. My dissertation will literally be for three guys (not swine, quite sweet) whose job it is to read the dreck (unpolished pearls) of graduate students; I feel privileged briefly to have their attention, and hope I can hear them out and learn from them. I do not labor under any delusions of improving academic mores; I am less than a drop in the ocean. I do care for my own sake to achieve the greatest possible clarity while undertaking an extended exercise of what’s basically explanation (this is very different from the approach to poetry and therefore exciting for me). I chose multiple complicated and ineffable areas of study and now attempt to pull silks of simplicity and daily application out of them. I read poems that according to scholarship shouldn't mean anything and give them divine exegesis and significance.
Maybe this critical project has something to do with my own sense of a lack of readership for my own poems. Maybe it has been something to do while waiting for more poems to come. Everything feels like that, ultimately. There are long stretches when I'm not writing (not writing poems, i.e.) and I don't know what to do with myself. Cooking, cleaning, loving my partner, going on walks? Calling my mother?
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Sep 4 Pagsanjan
I was talking to Jerry. He said that it seems like almost everyone on the production is going through some personal transition, a "journey" in their life. Everyone who has come out here to the Philippines seems to be going through something that is affecting them profoundly, changing their perspective about the world or themselves, while the same thing is supposedly happening to Willard in the course of the film. Something is definitely happening to me and to Francis.
—Eleanor Coppola, Notes (during filming "Apocalypse Now," 1976)
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Updates
I will have mentorship hours available starting in August, upon submission of my completed dissertation. Until then, I am in no way qualified to offer advice on the life of the artist, as I am up to my eyeballs in finishing this thing. It would not be good modeling for me to procrastinate my revisions by booking up clients instead. In the second half of the year, I'll turn to revamping my offerings, rolling out some more involved self-study programs for writers, and teaching live and in person.
I'm also planning to self-publish five collections of poems and photographs from previous phases in my writing life -- two from Berkeley, one each from Ann Arbor, Vienna, and Santa Cruz -- and make those books available for readers. The poems are all written, but are awaiting revision, and the manuscripts need to be shaped and images chosen and book layouts formatted. This is a harvesting year, in a way, I suppose. There are a lot of logistical steps between me and you, in our roles of writer and reader, and I don't want to overlook them or rush them for the sake of social media (like this platform). I don't know where to leave this note except to thank you for reading and to wish you the best in whatever creative work you are in the process of this year.
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