An Ecology of Creativity (II)
Editor's Note:
This is the second installment in a three-part essay. Read Part I here.
The part where we state some of the ecological issues within the State of the field.
The US publishing industry is fixed within Entertainment. Lit field industry players openly recognize and formalize the relationship during fundraisers, galas, and celebratory events. In 2013, talk show host, journalist, and writer, Mika Brzezinski, hosting the National Book Awards for the National Book Foundation, called it “the Oscars of the book world” and author and actor Fran Lebowitz, in the same year, called it “the Oscars without money." This was crystalized by repetition over years. In 2020, talk show host, comedian, producer, writer, Seth Myers, while hosting Pen America’s awards night noted Pen’s event as “the Oscars for Books.” He returned in 2022, resurrected the phrase, and Pen widely marketed, again, in 2023. Gameplay of gala politics? Poignantly, Entertainment is currently shut down with a long overdue writers strike and both NBF and Pen have done a better job with embracive representation. Comparatively speaking, the Oscars have been notoriously exclusive, so where’s the value?
The Entertainment field is rich with history of cutthroat competition; stars, lesser supporting players, bit actors, extras, and all of those in service to. Undeniable inequities exist in each of these elemental positional spaces. Overall, field stakes are laid out, pitched, and flagged with evergreen content claims featuring some miraculous best, over all other players. Playing out that model in the lit field, where poets are being publicly acknowledged, forwarded, promoted, celebrated, some for the first time, others with preexisting carte blanche celebrity status, surely sets a tenuous stage of enactment and truly unnecessary trickle down.
Assassinations come in many forms.
My students likely all know my long-held belief that we may never actually see the best writing, hear the best music, see the most engaging film, art, or performance possible, because the system often prevents that actual genius from appearing, from ever entering the maze of the respective field whole, intact, unharmed. Too, there is an understanding in many modes within Entertainment, particularly with funding entities, that rewards are given freely to those who make great tablemates and bits of scraps might be tossed to those expected to be in service to them.
On the other hand, genius, the real deal, typically isn’t all that comfortable to be in the company of. Most of the time it seriously challenges everything status quo around it, or flatly ignores what is surrounding altogether; uninterested unless engaged, mused, inspired.
From keypad, pen, pencil (digital or lead), to submission, following through with effort to place poems where they might be published and read, where transcendence of words and intentional language may affect others, move them, a poet sends out the very things their engagement and inspiration create. The chance of it landing well, placed efficiently to gain a bit of wing in the world, to offer something to some semblance of readership, is dependent on far more than some aerodynamic embodiment of form. Much of the sustaining field the work must rely upon is full of opportunity and disadvantage.
Not to mention the slush pile catastrophe. Magazine, or contest submissions, often scoured by interns, students, staff, for pieces they prefer, no matter their familiarity, prior to moving along to editors, jurors, or senior staff and often sent back with midpoint form letter rejection, while the editors/jurors scour for recognizable names and invitees before getting to any of the preliminary suggestions, or not. The industry takes advantage of good-natured and visionary poets as pro bono guest editors, jurors, staff set to put it all together for the press, for the sake of the work as a whole. In-kind labor.
Instead of sustained creative joy, more typically, exhaustion is met, energy and effort wasted, with perilous obstruction to engagement, to kinship, to that electrical sense of shared spirit, resulting instead in soul-killing block to entry, to acceptance, much less support, or field acknowledgement. Competitive one-upmanship prevails, versus a shared admiration, camaraderie, holistic and harmonious celebratory state of the field one might know if by some miracle they end up jointly celebrated with mutual peers in the field, if only for a night.
Inequity is rampant. So is depression.
Not so long ago, a publisher shared with me that they changed their press internships from volunteer to paid specifically to address the fact that the only applicants were people who could afford to intern without pay, as they were otherwise supported, taken care of, or independently flush. The press simultaneously found that the only people who resubmitted and/or made a case for publication with the press following manuscript rejection were Anglo and largely male. Everyone else just went elsewhere or quit submitting and shelved the work altogether. The only thing I found surprising in this is that anyone ever entered dialogue to make a case for the press to reconsider, though it was unsurprising who did. That this point of entry was carved out for those who could afford to be at the table, was not surprising in the least.
With industry, in general, hierarchy exists. With hierarchy, workers in service, those who devote their lives to bringing shine to others, exist at-risk to self in fulfillment of literary aims, including suppression of their own creative shine.
Seen as essential décor versus potential honored feature, the expenditure to make the world a better place for all often leaves the most generous flattened behind the trendy and famous curve. Often obtuse and perhaps layered with subjective matters, field opaqueness, and nearly invisible prominent behind-the-scenes players, poets already inside the scene can’t necessarily divine what works to gain better traction once they enter. They simply try to stay in the spotlight, ensuring they keep their position, often at the expense of other working poets remaining on the sidelines, for good.
In some cases, literary events are entirely volunteer effort, on all sides. Hosts and presenters pay their own way and often pay fees to participate if the event is held within a field conference, symposium, or lit field entity space dedicated to community or public-facing events.
Just imagine, for a moment, if all the participatory fees, travel, lodging, and miscellaneous costs paid to engage in major conferences in the lit field, were instead set to fund deepening poetry community, creating companionship, deepening solidarity, truer fellowship, amity among poets for poetry’s sake and to encourage understanding of and merit toward poetry in the US.
Imagine if early education treated poetry as a science, as something that might hold secrets to our understanding something of the meaning of the universe through careful contemplation, willful experimentation, by following each curiosity in attempting to know our world, the galaxy we live in and beyond, as well as each iota of element nearby, at hand. Imagine if poetry was part of the way we learned history as children, or of the subtle and tangible measure of our existence. What if we learned, as children, the true aspects of poetics and of careful use of language as a necessity, as a required course in the wealth of education we offer youth, if it is offered.
Instead, we are in a time when the New York Public Library is offering free cards to anyone living in a state where book banning is suddenly rampant, where libraries are being turned into learning centers sans the books that previously lined walls and walls of shelves. When challenge to thought is suddenly deemed a negative, versus educative. When authors, poets, and writers are blacklisted, lose the freedom to write, to engage, with public surety, and instead are punished by erasure, removal, banning—our ability to read our world lessens significantly.
As poets, we engage in what moves us to move others.
In a perfect world, our swirling collective mass might locate some unified rise, gathered, warmed by natural currents, continually gathering, and cradling our movement while we freely glide, rumination rich, in some inspired kettling in life like sandhill cranes ride thermals, rising, motivated upwards in splendid columns, with wingspan wide as taller humankind. The elevator lift allowing for a bit of elegance, for ease in our free flight. Our soaring united in a convocation of community with equity in shared space and goals. Mercy.
Let’s imagine, for a moment, what that might look like in the future field, beginning today. Let’s imagine what legacy we can leave.
For now, a pocketful of poems to experience and a bit of muse to consider enacting.
Poem Prompt: Sky Seated
Locate a place, a thing, a character in which Sky, or the idea/reflection of Sky is seated. Here, a tiny courtyard with a glass top table Full of Sky, but it needn’t be this obvious. A nuance is all you need.
Write a poem based in Sky somehow also existing here, below.
Open it up to reveal the immensity that offers.
Pull it in to definitive placement.
Enjoy the process and the possibility.
Poetry Selections:
“Legacy” by Amiri Baraka
“On the First Day She Made Birds” by Diana García
“Déjà Vu” by Carmen Giménez Smith
“My Father Teaches Me to Dream” by Jan Beatty
“Dead Reckoning III” by Yusef Komunyakaa
“Prose Poem (‘The morning coffee.’)” by Ron Padgett
Allison Adelle Hedge Coke was born in Texas raised in North Carolina, Canada, and on the Great Plains…
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