CAREERISM VS. LITERATURE

Years ago

when I was in grad school

I had a poetry professor

who wasn’t much of a teacher

but was a lot of fun to drink with.

One evening after a night class

he pulled me aside and said

in a very serious way

“I may drink a whole bottle

of Jack Daniels

and fall down the stairs

but it doesn’t mean

I have to put it in a poem”

which may have been decent career advice

and suddenly made clear his own PG-rated poems.

I was writing autobiographical narratives

like most young poets

and my autobiography was pretty scruffy:

I lived an old apartment with a struggling Army vet

and an undergraduate alcoholic who stood

six feet tall and sometimes set his hair on fire

I was 3rd assistant manager at B. Dalton

which meant I had to steal dinner money

from the cash registers to have a proper meal

I read and believed Baudelaire when he said

“Be drunk…with wine, virtue, or poetry”

though I would have added dope and fucking

and long mornings staring at the ceiling

with vigor and great seriousness

and eating long slow breakfasts with bacon

and listening to Bo Diddley at midnight  

and tongue kissing strangers in Dee’s Bar

I didn’t have insurance and wouldn’t for years

I was a recovering born-again Christian

who woke each morning with God

puking last night’s sins in his ear.

I subsisted on writing and reading

believing that somehow my poverty

might end up useful.

What my professor meant was: be fake.

He meant tell half-truths.

He could have been everyone I knew

at church and work, the people I’d hoped

to ditch by becoming a serious writer.

My professor put his arm on my shoulder.

The other students walked off, maybe

believing I was receiving extra praise.

What my professor meant was: bullshit.

He meant: the way to success

is inaccuracy and a spit-polished life.

I laughed at him, not in a mean way

but because I was stunned.

The language I most loved and wrote in

was barspeak, dive barspeak, and it may

have sounded garbled in a workshop

obsessed with politics but it told more truth

than anything I’d ever heard in a classroom

and I’d have quit writing before I spoke

in anything less than what I heard in the night.

Do I have to say my professor is more successful

than I am and will ever be?

This was more than 20 years ago

it’s still everything that’s wrong with literature

and the general fuckheadedness of the world—

no one telling the truth and claiming it’s the truth.

-- Dave Newman