Dear Friends,

This is the last of the questions from my interview with the Persian poet that I am going to post. I’m wondering if any of you have questions you’d like me to write about. If you do, please send them using the contact form on this site.

Richard

Fame means the condition of being well-known. Please tell me what are the good or bad points of being well-known? Anne Stevenson in her book, Bitter Fame, claims that Sylvia Plath’s need for fame could cause her mental distress. James Tate in one of his essays says: “Fame for a true artist is a luxury.” What do you think?

I haven’t read Stevenson’s book and I don’t know that quote by James Tate, so I can’t really use them as the context for my response. It is true, though, that when I first started to think of myself as a poet—I was an undergraduate in college—I wanted very much to be famous. I wanted other poets, critics, publishers—anyone who had anything to say about the value of a poet’s work to society—to call my work important and necessary. On some level, in fact, and it’s a little embarrassing to admit this now, I actually believed I deserved that kind of recognition. Foolish and naïve as I now know myself to have been, though, I’m also grateful for the chutzpah of that belief, since I don’t know if I would have continued writing without it. Indeed, I think all artists, regardless of medium or genre, need to have some measure of that chutzpah, because chutzpah is what it takes to lay claim with your work to an audience’s time (and often money).

You asked me, though, what I think about being famous. Fame—and this is something I wish I had understood a long time ago—is manufactured, produced through a combination of the right kind of self-promotion, having the right connections, having the right people advocate for your work, having the right kind of public persona, and, in general, being in the right place at the right time, both in terms of the kind of poetry you write and the person you happen to be. I know, for example, of at least one very well-known American poet whose fame is due in no small measure to the publicist they hired before their first book even came out—which means, and this is something we don’t generally talk about, they had the money, the privilege, the class status to afford that publicist’s services. This does not mean this poet is not “a good poet,” whatever you understand that phrase to signify. There were in fact moments of real power in their first book, and I am glad I read those poems, but the book itself, in my opinion, did not live up to the hype that surrounded it, which had more to do with what the market wanted than with whether or not this poet’s work added something fame-worthy to the art itself.

I don’t mean to say, obviously, that there aren’t poets who deserve their fame—and you and I might very well disagree about which poets should be on that list—but it’s worth remembering that there are other, equally worthy poets who never achieve fame, who keep writing anyway, and whose work, for those people who have read it, may end up mattering far more than the work of poets whose names everyone knows. I would be lying, of course, if I said I did not want to be better known as a poet than I am. It would be nice to be able to use that fame to make my art the center of my life in the way that only fame would allow me to do; but when I think about whether or not I really want fame, I cannot help but also be aware of how that kind of notoriety brings with it a set of audience and market expectations and how maintaining your fame can come to depend on your willingness (and ability) to continue to fulfill them. I am also aware that the fact of fame can end up conferring on anything you say or produce, no matter how poorly thought out or shoddily constructed, an aura of seriousness it clearly does not deserve; and I am sure we can all think of examples to illustrate that fact.

When I think about what my reputation as a poet means to me now—to get back to answering your question more directly—I think about the audience(s) that matter most to me, and those are the people for whom my work has mattered in material ways. I think about the young man who told me that my first book, The Silence Of Men, was a kind of lifeline for him when he was first coming to terms with the sexual abuse he suffered as a child. I think about the man around my age who, rather than say anything in front of others who might hear, followed me into the bathroom after a reading from Words For What Those Men Have Done to tell me that he too was a survivor and thank me for my work. I think about the open letter written to me on The Great American Pinup by someone who recommended The Silence Of Men to a friend who’d “learned a secret about his father…that shook the foundation on which he’d built his life.” And I think about the email I received from a justifiably very famous poet to thank me for what she saw as the form I invented in T’shuvah, iambic pentameter tercets with a particular rhetorical structure and about the poem she sent me in that form.

When I strip away my ego, being known in this way is what I care about most. If the other kind of fame should find me, I won’t reject it, but it has not been for a very long time what I am looking for.