Self Pity and Dumb Luck

Posted on May 1, 2004 in Poetry

Lynn and I went to hear B.H. Fairchild in Huntington Beach, an episode in the ongoing Tebot Bach poetry series. I don’t think a member of the crowd wasn’t laughing in sympathy when he described the frustration of applying for poetry prize after poetry prize and seeing the award go to the student of the professor judging the contest. We were nearly all outlaw poets in that room, many of us self-educated and not a single one of us fettered with the letters “M F A” after our names.

(Here in the Orange, we live under the velvet shadow of the University of Irvine creative writing program where E.R. Doctorow and others have taught.)

Fairchild wondered just how many Emily Dickinsons had given up after seeing academic politics triumph over invention; this preface led to a hilarious poem in which he attempted to break a rule of the MFA pundits, namely that you can’t write a poem with self-pity as the subject. He both proved and disproved the rule as he talked about looking in his mirror just at the time when he was about to give up poetry forever and noticing that his nose was shaped like an old fig. (You know, it was.)

The tension between the educated and the self-educated has long shaped the history of literature. From time to time, I look back at myself with self-pity for the fact that I did not make the promise of my graduate fellowship. But from this vantage point — tonight — I feel differently. I feel blessed. I ‘m not constantly gauging myself against this theorist or that, but trying to figure out for myself what I think, what I feel, what I believe. The encounters I have had with fellow poets in my otherwise buckshot-peppered-headed community have revived my faith in human potential and possibilities outside of The Canon — which is a homonym for cannon, an empty tube that fires a big, mind-destroying iron ball.

I don’t reject Keats, etc., but I won’t be held to thinking thoughts that please professors or that please other people because it matches the glob they get off television. On my desk right now, I have a copy of Sam Hamill’s Dumb Luck. In a frame around the title, Sam wrote:

Joel –
May lots of
Dumb Luck
attend you too–

For a day or two after he inscribed it, I wondered if I’d been insulted. Then I realized the power of the mantra, of the prayer, of the spell that Sam had cast over me. It takes dumb luck to succeed against the privilege that comes with wealth, sexual attractiveness, an “interesting” background, etc. I believe it now to be a compliment, an acknowledgement of the potential I seek in myself and others.

Thank you Sam and Bert for the gifts you gave me and the other OC poets this week.

Damn. What do I have to hand to the next person?