The Amateur

Asking how my criticism relates to my poetry is like asking how my obsessions relate to my compulsions. It’s a question I’m much too glad to answer. I like Jhumpa Lahiri’s definition of the writer: “a reader who can’t control himself and therefore writes.” This seems especially true of the critic, whose zealous margin notes eventually clamor for a page of their own. But it’s also true of the poet, who is so often saluting or mouthing off to predecessors (sometimes in the same line).

For me, creative and critical writing are part of the same activity, like scratching your back first with one hand, then the other. Unlike backscratching, however, writing seeks an audience. Or audiences, plural. I try to keep three in mind: my friends and loved ones, my literary community, and my broader community. None of these audiences can ever be assumed (with the exception of a long-suffering friend or two). But on some level, I play to each—as I think most writers do—in a trio of overlapping roles I’ll call the amateur, the professional, and the citizen. I’ll take up the first of these here and the others in subsequent posts.

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I almost called this role “the enthusiast.” But “amateur” used to have a similar meaning (its root is the Latin for “love”), and I decided I wanted the judgier connotations, too. I wanted to embrace them. There are ways in which I’d like to remain, if not unprofessional, non-professional. Maybe, every now and then, anti-professional.

For me, writing is hard work that has to sustain a core element of play. As soon as the process starts to feel too “official,” I freeze. It has to feel like truancy, or recess, or passing a note to a crush in homeroom. Maybe, every now and then, total delinquency.

It helps that poetry culture itself feels so unofficial. Our awards aren’t televised; our stars aren’t household names; our stages are often a little sticky. You might easily find yourself, as an unknown writer, reading beside the best in your field in a dive on a Thursday night. That’s part of the allure, the strange anti-glamour of this pursuit.

“Art, if it doesn’t start there, at least ends / In an attempt to entertain our friends.” A contrarian statement at first glance, but as usual, W. H. Auden was on to something. Even the sternest and gravest poets—William Wordsworth, say, or Adrienne Rich—fanned the blaze of their best work from the spark of the social. Think of those lakeside strolls with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, think of Rich’s passionate friendships. Wordsworth sought “the real language of men”; Rich dreamed of a “Common Language.” I can’t claim that kind of project, but I aspire to keep my table awake at the open mic.

This isn’t always the same thing as pleasing the crowd.

You do have to please yourself, in the true amateur spirit, before you can reach anyone else. I’ve now written several poems and one essay about outer space, a subject that mesmerized me as a kid. I spent long evenings poring over The Space Atlas (Couper and Henbest, 1992), devouring data about other planets: their satellites and atmospheres and gravitational forces, the heights of their volcanoes and the depths of their craters. But I never really wanted to be an astronaut. My investment was imaginative. Those alien landscapes were terrifying as nothing on Earth could be: sublimely, stomach-droppingly ominous. The other planets mocked us in a way I had no words for—the way the desert mocks the statue of Ozymandias—but I had to feel sorry for them, too, they seemed so botched and pointless. There they were, spinning out their stormy parallel histories, unobserved, or shrugged off by their solar system’s only observers. Jupiter was ponderous, unwieldy, somehow violent and dull at once; Venus was absurdly malignant, threatening to crush, poison, and burn you if you came anywhere near it. Even the surface of our moon, the object of so many human dreams, looked like a grim desert roadside where the astronauts’ vehicles had broken down. I felt we didn’t talk or think enough about these scary, funny neighbors—much less the void beyond them—so I’ve returned often to this subject in my grown-up work. Or play.

I’d always rather share this kind of deep-seated preoccupation (whether love or dread or both) than write a “spontaneous” poem, or do quick-take criticism of the social-media kind.

I notice I’m not alone in this approach. I’m charmed by those poets who reveal themselves suddenly as amateur naturalists, writing about caribou and krummholz from suburban Cleveland. And by poets who become lay historians of a favorite period, their research sweeping and academically unpresentable. Whole literary careers have thrived on such enthusiasms (Marianne Moore’s, Geoffrey Hill’s). The criticism I love sounds as if it started as a spiel at a party, delivered with drink-sloshing gesticulation.

The rule I’ve been moving toward is: passion projects only. I’m likely to spend months on any poem or essay; if there’s no crackle at the outset, no butterflies, why bother? Some inner vat should be almost bubbling over before I start bottling.

Work, in the salaried sense, can never be like this. But once the amateur passion has had its say, you do have to tend to the professional side of things. (You can’t dodge it forever—even Emily Dickinson arranged her fascicles for family to find.) This is where poetry and criticism start to diverge.