It'll Be An Honor

I've been asked to be Keynote Speaker for the Missouri Writers Guild Conference 2010 (April 16-18 in Chesterfield). What an honor! More about this later when it is confirmed....

Great, Productive, and Beloved: Pick 2

An artist can be Great, Productive, and Beloved, but probably not all three at once.

• Great and Productive: Great and Productives, later in life when there's money, may be beloved by a servile non-entity. Before then, partners, if any, feel neglected and jealous of the writer's devotion to writing (Ted Hughes, The Brontes, Flannery O'Connor, T.S. Eliot, Derek Walcott, Doris Lessing). Public opinion has it that "they're not very nice people."
  
• Productive and Beloved: Egged on by warmth and approval, these do it all: literature, journalism, essays, poems, maybe even drama. (Stephen King, George Eliot, Joyce Carol Oates, Maya Angelou, Rudyard Kipling, Mary Oliver, Joan Didion). The drawback: the "Great" label is rarely bestowed.
  
• Beloved and Great: probably foreign or ethnic or very old; flies around the world receiving honors, giving readings to packed rooms at universities. Years may pass between books (Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Frost, Marianne Moore, Kurt Vonnegut, Elie Wiesel, Chinua Achebe, Ko Un).
  

You can be the first writer on your block to be Great, Productive, and Loved. When you manage it, tell us how you did it. It is my goal.

"Part of Being a Great Poet Is. . ."

"Part of being a great poet is having great pictures of yourself taken," Tess Gallagher told our class back in '87; and I admit to being fascinated by author photos, especially studio or "studied" photos such as these here. Such photos alone express the high drama and confidence involved in the work of writing -- never otherwise visible. Probably for the drama of it, authors are traditionally photographed only in black & white. True, I've seen some super-dramatic, off-putting, plunge-neckline jacket photos, but most writers have more taste than that.

Here's Tess (photographed in Washington State by Corbin) in 1987, about age 44, when I knew her; the picture is on her book Amplitude: New and Selected Poems. And here's Vladimir Mayakovsky as a 20-year-old art student in 1913, the year he published his collection "I" and blew some windows out of the Moscow literary establishment. I like how Mayakovsky defined himself in a poem: "I'm not a man; I'm a cloud in trousers!"

Poet Marina Tsvetayeva, Mayakovsky's contemporary, left a hint on what she thought writers should wear: "Clothes that are not beautiful in the wind are not beautiful at all."