How much does publication matter to you?
"Don’t put too much store by acceptances and rejections. It’s a crapshoot—who gets noticed, who gets awards." — ANDREA COHEN, Poet of the Week
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Andrea Cohen is the author of eight books of poetry, including The Sorrow Apartments (Four Way Books, 2024). Other collections include Everything, Nightshade, Unfathoming, Furs Not Mine, Kentucky Derby, Long Division, and The Cartographer's Vacation. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Threepenny Review, The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, and elsewhere. Awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship and several fellowships at MacDowell. She directs the Blacksmith House Poetry Series in Cambridge, MA, and is currently teaching at Boston University.
Contingency
In another life, I’d want this one.
Strategically Speaking
They said we were human shields— they who were human spears.
“I feel lucky that I get to get up every morning and sit down at a table and think about poems. Or not think too much, and just see what happens when I begin. With a word, a phrase, an idea.
Then it’s off to the races. Maybe the horse stumbles. Or wanders off to a field. Maybe the horse meets another horse and says: hey, let’s have a picnic, let’s talk about why we prefer anything to these races. The delight in writing is the not knowing where one is going and the discovery along the way. I was visiting a poetry class at Worcester State University last week, and a couple students asked: What’s the hardest thing about writing poems? And I said: Nothing. Digging ditches is hard. Working in a poultry plant is hard. Being the chicken headed to the poultry plant is hard. Getting to write poems? That’s a pleasure.”
“I advise young poets to have both humility and hubris. And the good sense to know when each should be employed.
I suggest (implore) young poets to have fun. To not worry too much about one poem. To imagine that all our poems are in service of the next one. Or that we are in fact writing one poem. Of course we revise and try to get poems right. But young poets can feel this pressure to get to perfection. And that can stymy creativity. So much of good poetry, and the wondrous mystery of poetry, comes from the unconscious. So I ask young poets to let the poem lead them. To trust that. To trust themselves. And to edit later. And to remember what Wislawa Szymoborska said when asked why she had published so few poems: “I have a trash can in my home.”
More advice: Don’t put too much store by acceptances and rejections. It’s a crapshoot—who gets noticed, who gets awards. The race may go to the swiftest, but the prizes can go to all sorts of talents or tastes of the moment. The poem I think is brilliant you may find mediocre. There’s so much subjectivity to all this. So I also advise young poets is to have both humility and hubris. And the good sense to know when each should be employed.
And above all, my counsel is to read. Because good poems really are our best teachers. For writing. For living.”
How much does publication matter to you?
You can catch up on some of the answers to last week’s question here:
This week, inspired by Andrea Cohen’s interview, we want to probe into our deepest inner convictions and confusions. Is it more important to write a good poem or to get it published? How about winning awards and becoming — gasp! — a famous poet? Be honest, share your dreams and grievances, tell us: how much does it matter to you to get your poems published?
Both. But I'd prefer writing good poems over being published because I have a vision in my mind to satisfy. It's more important to give the world good poems rather than just being published.
It matters about as much as watching the housing market. Important if you want to be one of the gifted few who can scratch together what the economy wants and be selected for a house/pub, but it's all smoke and mirrors. I will always be my second favorite Poet, and the first is always the last one I've read. Whatever the open market reports.