Chapter 17

The Dangers of Concentrating on Publication

As I entered high school, I began to read a lot of the imagist poets and the translations in One Hundred Poems from the Japanese by Kenneth Rexroth. Those poems influenced me tremendously. In fact, I believe writing haiku after haiku taught me how to use imagery in my poems. I also read and studied the imagist poets such as Amy Lowell and Carl Sandburg. I learned from all this reading how to use imagery in a natural way, so that it was as though I had absorbed the images through all the pores of my skin. Years later, as the style of my poems changed, I dropped almost all of the imagery; I tried to use more of the language of ordinary speech in my poems. But at 16, I was truly bitten by the writing bug when two pages of my imagistic poems were published in a glossy magazine. That publication encouraged me and helped me to believe in myself. It also solidified my desire to be a writer.

The danger, I think, of connecting writing with publication is that you can end up focusing on writing in a way that will be acceptable and publishable. If you concentrate on publication possibilities when you’re writing, I think you lose your focus on the writing itself. Instead of the process of writing – the desire to shape our experience into language that can form a bridge between your life and that of others – you concentrate on what is bland and acceptable. You become afraid to take any risks in your work.

When you’re writing, you need to concentrate on the poem or story you are writing; you need to find the voice inside yourself that fits the poem or story and that is honest and true to the story. Publication is important. We all like to be published and to win prizes and awards. It validates us and our work, but in the end, it is the writing that matters. If it’s any good, it will last long after no one remembers the names of any prize, no matter how prestigious.

I could paper ten rooms with rejections slips and contest letters informing me I didn’t win, but I don’t care about it as much as I did 20 years ago. I have to believe in what I’m doing with my work and where that work needs to go, even if no one else agrees. I know that I’m on a journey and that I have to follow wherever my instinct about writing leads me. I can’t worry who likes what I’m doing and who doesn’t. I hope that the readers of this book will learn much more quickly what it has taken me so many years to learn. Your instincts know more about what you need to write than anyone who exists outside of your skin.