Ambition, the moth of holiness

On the cringey, embarrassing, all too human need for external validation, which seems never to depart.

A couple good things happened to ya boi recently. (For the purposes of this Substack, I am ya boi unless otherwise specified, e.g. ‘Ya boi Donald Rumsfeld was a war criminal.’ You get the picture.)

One of those things is that I got a sudden flurry of publication acceptances for some poems I wrote. What that means, for people who have never dipped a toe into the nerd-ass world of literary journals, is that I sent some stuff I’d written to various publications put out by universities or just weirdo literature collectives. They then took anywhere from a few weeks to a year to get back to me, because lol that’s just how they do. Then I got a scattered trickle of emails saying thanks but no thanks. But then all at once I started to get some saying yes please.

It’s a weird thing for me to tell people, mostly because I kind of don’t want to admit that I write (and read) poetry. It makes me sound like an asshole. Rather, it makes me sound like a different kind of asshole, a kind I am less resigned to being.

Once, on a dating app, a woman asked what I was reading and I told her truthfully that it was a poetry collection – by the big homie Ada fucking Limon, if memory serves – and she was like ugh poetry is so pretentious. At which point I was like, girl you think you’re too good for the distilled expression of the human soul practiced by great artists from Shakespeare and Sappho to Ryokan and Rilke?!? No, of course I didn’t say that. I just thought it as I unmatched her basic ass so she could go quote episodes of “The Office” to someone else.

I get why people think poetry is bullshit and those who write it in their spare time must be insufferable. If I met someone at a party and they described themselves as a poet, I would have to shift all my focus into preventing my eyes from reflexively rolling so hard they became lodged in my brain. You hear ‘poet’ and you picture someone who takes themselves very seriously. Maybe they wear a lot of scarves, possibly a stupid hat. They are definitely always saying some nonsense to seem deep. Basically that guy from the party scene in “Annie Hall” who says he wants her to touch his heart with her foot.

(You just knew she was totally falling for that shit too)

Thing is, if someone told you they wrote fan fiction or painted watercolor landscapes or carved miniature fantasy figureines in their free time you would probably think it was maybe a little (or a lot) dorky, but hey if it gives them an artistic outlet and a sense of personal fulfillment, that’s great. But if you’re a middle-aged white guy and you tell people you love poetry, they either a) don’t believe you and think it’s a ruse for picking up chicks or whatever, or b) immediately wish you would preemptively shut the fuck up.

For a long time I wrote this stuff in secret. It was kind of like a journal, just in a different form. I thought it would always be only for me, and I appreciated it for that function it served in my life. I’ve got poems about when my kids were babies and toddlers. Poems about good times and bad times, people I once loved but now don’t speak to, pets that are now dead and gone, all that. A bunch of stuff I would have totally forgotten about if it wasn’t written down somewhere.

It was only in the last couple years that I took more of an interest in craft and theory and structure, which then led to me going back to edit these poems into something resembling polished, finished products. And once I’d done that I wondered, hey do you think the people who publish poetry would actually publish mine?

So I started sending some of them out. Even as I was doing it I asked myself why I was doing it. But honestly, I knew. I wanted the external validation. I hoped that someone who was some kind of authority of poetry would look at mine and say, yes these are good.

I had gone through this same process with short fiction, but it felt different with poetry. Maybe it’s that, when you’re writing fiction, you can at least tell yourself that maybe you’ll get somewhere with this. Publish a novel or a story collection. Maybe get a little money from it. Maybe (and here’s where it veers hard into fantasy) it gets made into a movie and you get real money from it. Or maybe you send your story off to the Missouri Review or whothefuckever and get a nice rejection email nine months later, long after you forgot that you even sent it to them. (I did actually get a pretty nice rejection email from the Missouri Review just last week and I appreciated it almost as much as the nice acceptance emails.)

But with poetry you can’t even tell yourself that this is for the sake of any conceivable career advancement. You certainly can’t hope there’ll be money in it. It becomes very clear that you’re only writing it for yourself and only sending it out because you want someone to tell you you’re pretty.

It’s humbling to realize this, to discover that you still need or at least want that validation. And one way you know that it really is about validation is that I haven’t linked you to any of the already published stuff or told you where you’ll be able to find the recently accepted stuff when it comes out in the next few months. There’s a part of me that doesn’t want people who actually know me to read it. I just want strangers who care about poetry to assure me that mine isn’t so bad. Which, wow, what the fuck is that?

It reminds me of a scene in “Conclave,” a current best picture nominee that I strongly recommend to anyone who likes movies that are mostly just great actors talking. In this scene, a Catholic cardinal played by Stanley Tucci apologizes to another played by Ralph Fiennes, saying he was wrong to have accused him of being overly covetous of the top job when in reality that was mostly a projection of his own motives.

“It’s shameful,” he says. “To be this age and still not know yourself.”

Then he gives his head a little shake and adds, by way of explaining his own shortcomings: “Ambition, the moth of holiness.”

I do not aspire to holiness. But I get what he’s saying here. Everybody wants to be somebody, so we do these little things for a pat on the head or a gold star from the teacher. Shit is embarrassing, really. Cringe, as my daughters would say.

But then I also think of a thing that my eldest daughter’s middle school teacher tells them sometimes in an effort to get these tweens to stop being so agonizingly aware of the opinions of their peers: “To be cringe is to be free.”

There is truth in this middle school wisdom. If you hold back because you’re scared of looking like a dork – especially the kind of dork who gets way too into a self-indulgent and extremely niche art form that brings him pleasure – then you’re really just walling yourself off into a smaller corner of the world. If you would only get over yourself already and risk that embarrassment you might taste some of that sweet, sweet richness of the human experience and what not.

I think a lot about a thing I once heard without remembering who said it or in what context: “No one will ever be moved by the thing you didn’t write.”

I also think of Thomas Harris, the guy who wrote “Silence of the Lambs” and a bunch of other books, who was asked some very innocuous question about his process or whatever in a New York Times interview and replied by quoting Flaubert: “Language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.”