Power, Money and Fame

Linh: Everyone wants power. And money. And fame. Get over it.--Kenneth Goldsmith
I don't seem to want power or money or fame. I only seem to want food and shelter, (library) books and good friends.--Unreliable Narrator

He said, she said, but I say that if power, money and fame are your primary objectives in life, then poetry is a dismal career choice. Imagine hearing your teenaged offspring confiding at the dinner table, his or her mouth stuffed with Chef Boy R Dee, "Mom, dad, since I won't rest until I’ve achieved lots of power, money and fame, I've decided to study noncreative writing with Kenneth Goldsmith at the University of Pennsylvania." With tuition for 2008-2009 at $37,526 and rising fast, $51,300 if you count cost of living, I’d advise against such a bold choice, unless you’re really dedicated to non-creativity, then go for broke, literally, and don’t look back!
Sure, it’s nice to always have enough change to eat, at least, and be sheltered, but money and power—I’ll leave out fame, for now--are rarely the rewards for those who won’t quit emjambing, starting from early youth, even as rejection slips flutter around their ankles, so what they’re chasing must be more pathetic and sublime than anything that would interest, say, Hank Paulson, Bernard Madoff or George W. Bush?

Let’s check in on Erasmus, speaking as the voice of Folly: “Poets aren't so much in my debt, though they're admittedly members of my party, as they're a free race, as the saying goes, whose sole interest lies in delighting the ears of the foolish with pure nonsense and silly tales. Yet strange to say, they rely on these for the immortality and god-like life they assure themselves, and they make similar promises to others. 'Self-love and flattery' are their special friends, and no other race of men worships me with such wholehearted devotion [...] Of the same kidney are those who court immortal fame by writing books. They all owe a great deal to me, especially any who blot their pages with unadulterated rubbish. But people who use their erudition to write for a learned minority and are anxious to have either Persius or Laelius pass judgment don't seem to me favored by fortune but rather to be pitied for their continuous self-torture. They add, change, remove, lay aside, take up, rephrase, show to their friends, keep for nine years and are never satisfied. And their futile reward, a word of praise from a handful of people, they win at such a cost – so many late nights, such loss of sleep, sweetest of all things, and so much sweat and anguish. Then their health deteriorates, their looks are destroyed, they suffer partial or total blindness, poverty, ill-will, denial of pleasure, premature old age and early death, and whatever remaining disasters there may be. Yet the wise man believes he is compensated for everything if he wins the approval of one or another purblind scholar.”
To conflate poetry with power, money and fame, one should go back to imperial China, with its mandarinate exams. Starting in the 7th century, it sought to supplant the leverage of the regional, hereditary aristocracy with a national test rewarding those who could master the Four Books and Five Classics of the Confucian canon, including the Book of Songs, an anthology of 305 poems, mostly folk lyrics, supposedly collected by Confucius himself. (Nonsense.) Emanating from the center of empire, this selection process was a power play to encourage and enforce cultural unity and an ideology of obedience, primarily to the state. By requiring knowledge of the Book of Songs, however, it also created generations of bureaucrats who had studied at least 305 poems, and could effortlessly crank out a few themselves. In the 20th century, Westerners have often marveled that the East Asian Communist dictators, Mao, Ho and Kim Jong Il, could write poetry, but this felicity was merely an echo from the mandarinate exams of the imperial era.
The fact that mandarins could emote in rhymes made many East Asian poets fantasize that they, too, could become movers and shakers. “Shoot, I oughta be a mandarin.” Well aware of this lingering vanity, East Asian Communist states bait and reward obedient poets with officious titles and perks, including foreign travel for the most docile. In Vietnam, members of the government-sanctioned Writers’ Union are invited to pompous annual conferences, where they can applaud lecturing politicians, then hop on stage to declare their fealty. The most vital Vietnamese poetry, however, is not penned by these marionettes. Instead of gravitating towards power, money and fame, the best and most radical Vietnamese poets have risked prison and lifelong poverty to write what they had to, compelled by a suprarational and frankly heroic, if not suicidal, impulse. Consider Trần Dần: born in 1926, he joined, as a twenty-year-old, the Communist resistance against the French, but by 1953, had fallen out of favor with the Party for speaking his mind. In 1956, he was jailed by the Communists for three months in Hoả Lò [The Furnace], better known to Americans as Hanoi Hilton, where he tried to commit suicide. Released, he became a key figure of the dissident group, Nhân Văn Giai Phẩm, that was quickly suppressed, all of its members jailed and silenced, with Trần Dần forced to do hard labor for months at a time. For 29 years, 1959 until 1988, he was completely banned from publishing, although he continued to write novels and some the most radical and striking poetry in Vietnamese literature. Thanks to its intricate wordplay, it hasn’t been adequately translated into any foreign language. Had Trần Dần accommodated the power structure at any point, his life, not to mention those of his wife and children, would have been much easier, but he never did, and why not? Could it be because he was a true poet? Nah, what a silly idea!
It’s human nature to gravitate towards money, power and fame, and to admire, if not kiss ass, those who have them, and to shun, ridicule or despise those who don’t. Wealth exudes glamour, even beauty, as in “the beautiful people” to denote the “jet set.” If to be radical is to go against the grain, what can one make of a poet who aligns himself with all the prevailing ethos of his place and time, be it a craving for money, power, fame, narcissism, or the glorification of trivia, ephemera, shopping and the machine? Is it possible to be more orthodox?