#342

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About fame. There is much of hoopla, prizes, interviews, photos in magazines. Imitations, translations, fan mail. As he is boarding a ship, his whereabouts became known and there were photographers waiting. The point is that this stuff is all froth, the price one pays for why one writes. You write because of this extra line tacked onto the end of the poem: “A lone letter from a young man: that is fame.”

Yep. The interviews, the money, the accolades: They bubble up off of what matters: language and ideas that reach a lone person, a student, maybe, under a single dim lamp in a cold attic apartment. Maybe he has a cat in his lap and his tea gets cold quickly, but it’s lovely when it’s hot. Probably she has lines of books along pine planks supported by plastic milk crates. For all the froth of fame, and all the commercialized bullshit that has overrun our lives, for all the publishers run like businesses for profit, and the universities run like businesses for profit, there will always be lonely young romantics immune to the nonsense because they’re smarter than that and they’re actually trying to figure out this mess we’ve made of things. Through all the noise voices are still speaking that offer guidance and advice about what it means to be alive and human, and they can still be heard. They echo out of the past; they are peers, colleagues and contemporaries whose low profile is chosen or enforced, but whose voice cuts through the clutter. To cut through, that’s all that matters to a real writer.

Is this a pose on B.’s part? I’m not feeling too cynical today, so no. His voice echoes still for a lot of people, even naïfs like me who had no idea what we would find when we opened his book. You take the first step on trust, and after that you take what comes. In B.’s case, I don’t always like the voice, and it’s loaded up with its own bullshit, often. But it’s a voice. In the end, that’s what matters. This whole project is a long, lone letter from a man (younger than his age) who’s still trying to figure this mess out.