The expression “living poetically” connotes a libertine, a person who marches to his own drummer, follows rules of their own whimsical invention, or answers only to his/her own inner voice, like the famous daimonion (δαιμόνιον[1]) of Socrates, albeit heedless of convention and societal norms. Modern pop culture is awash in libertines of this ilk, the noisy, public lives of musicians and actors come to mind.
A self-made person connotes a person of fierce independence, who relies on nobody other than him/herself for guidance, direction, and precedence in manner and conduct. A self-made person is utterly self-motivated and directed. The self-made person detests influence from parents, siblings, teachers, colleagues, and friends.
The idea of a self-made person itself smacks of a flimsy fiction unless perhaps it pertains to the Christian belief in being “born again”. Then, in that case, a self-made person might have a scriptural fig leaf as it is sanctioned by scripture and the example of Christ, might sufficiently appease Søren Kierkegaard. The only justifiable making of a self is to be spiritually reborn in a religious sense as when John the Baptist or Christ go out in the desert or Mohammed enters his cave.
Kierkegaard, as a classical scholar, would also have been alive to the meaning of the word of poet as a maker. Adam of Old Testament fame is considered the first poet, an appointed office inasmuch as God only accorded this gift to Adam, the first man, and to no other creature. Considering the metaphor quite literally, in its raw truth, the poet is a maker of words, phrases, stories, myths, narrations, epics, and verse but does not make himself or obsess with stories or fables about himself to advance a “persona”.
Kierkegaard’s position is that “living poetically” is a sham unless it is truly poetic, by which he means religious. He is contemptuous of any shallower idea of what a poetic life might entail.
Kierkegaard’s idea of living poetically puts in mind the staggering transformation of the 17th century British poet, John Donne, from the randy, young swain he mockingly dubbed “Jack” for his fixation on hedonistic, erotic poems to the religious poet of his later years when he earned back the right to call himself “John”[2].
Kierkegaard makes his position on living poetically utterly clear on P. 297 of The Concept of Irony:
Therefore, let it be said, as it will also be demonstrated, that these books are not only immoral but also unpoetic, for they are irreligious; let it above all be said that anyone can live poetically who truly wants to do so. If we ask what poetry is, we may say in general that it is victory over the world; it is through a negation of the imperfect actuality that poetry opens up a higher actuality, expands and transfigures the imperfect into the perfect and thereby assuages the deep pain that wants to make everything dark.
On George Saunders’s Story Club, a fellow clubber remarked on “the illusion of natural genius”. It reminded me, by way of contrast, of Edison’s “1% inspiration, 99% perspiration” axiom. Some authors may be good at their craft but they’re also often good or even better at creating the “illusion”.
Jack Kerouac comes to mind. It’s been to long since I read “On the Road” but I feel sure the image of him drafting his manuscript in a blinding flash of uninterrupted inspiration on a continuous roll of paper fed into a presumably scorching hot typewriter has done nothing to glorify the plodding Sisyphean nature of perfecting a short-story.
Glancing over at the Wikipedia entry for “On the Road”. Contrasting his methods with the on-stage performances of Jazz musicians discounts the vast quantity of hours consecrated to “art” in the woodshed. I am not surprised that he has an essay titled “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose”.
(I have to stop to admire David Brooks’s commentary on its legacy:
Reading through the anniversary commemorations, you feel the gravitational pull of the great Boomer Narcissus. All cultural artifacts have to be interpreted through whatever experiences the Baby Boomer generation is going through at that moment. So a book formerly known for its youthful exuberance now becomes a gloomy middle-aged disillusion.
Please tell me that you don’t love, “the Great Boomer Narcissus”!)
Kerouac now occurs to me to be a worthy contrast in styles to George Saunders’s loving, workmanlike embrace of revision.
Kerouac’s essay, per this synopsis on Genius (https://genius.com/Jack-kerouac-essentials-of-spontaneous-prose-annotated), is I suspect well worth the while. And the idea that we could someday write at improvisational speed is something we should always aspire towards.
What is so wrong about Kerouac’s modeling himself off of bee-bop Jazz musicians.
Charlie Parker as a role model (minus perhaps the addictions)? C’mon!
When I went to a small liberal arts college, Marlboro College, in southern Vermont in the eighties, a “Great Books” program and various other study choices immersed me in the Socratic method more so than I had ever realized. In fact only recently, over forty years later, taking a massively open online course (MOOC) on Søren Kierkegaard, much to remind me how invested I was in his method, habit of challenging conventional wisdom, the status quo, and established opinion.
For example, I read Nietzsche way back then and remembered and believed ever since in his declaration that “It’s not a matter of having the strength of one’s convictions, but the courage to attack one’s convections.” How Socratic is that? It became one of my mottos.
But in my long career as an engineer in the technology sector, it made me a little bit weird and suspicious to my colleagues. It made me willing to reverse my position or “nominal” opinion on a dime, sometimes in the middle of a meeting. For some, I imagine, it made me look uncertain (I was) and wishy-washy. Like Socrates, I didn’t always put much stock in defending a point of view. I preferred to challenge points of view. It was my brand of what Hegel and Kierkegaard recognized as “negativity”.
Needless to say that “negativity” however well intended didn’t and doesn’t go over well in a corporate environment or in modern, American business culture. It is an instinct I am proud of and suffer from simultaneously. The seductive properties of the Socratic Method need to be approached with caution (if by then it is not too late :-)).
In 2019 I decided I was ready to pitch my first novel, Schopenhauer in Love, to literary agents for the first time. I taught myself how to write a query letter, researched agents for those most likely to have an interest in a work of historical fiction about a 19th century German philosopher[1], read the best novels these agents had brought to light, wrote personalized letters only to those most likely to get excited by a book like mine, and tracked the letters I issued in an Excel spreadsheet.
I wrote to seven top-flight agents, managing to convince three of them to read the manuscript. Nicole Aragi, the rock-star agent of rock star authors Junot Diaz, Rebecca Makkai, and Colson Whitehead, was among them. Three out of seven was an extraordinary result.
But the rejections suggested I was a better writer of query letters than author of a novel. I needed a makeover, to shake things up. I needed either to become a better writer, a more interesting person, or both.
I concentrated on reading mostly women authors, authors of color, or authors outside of the United States. I tried writing poetry. I joined George Saunders online short-story course “Story Club”, drove around the country in a campervan, took up French, and read books on the theory of the novel and fiction writing. I purchased an Internet domain name, biketoenddivision.org, and chronicled an attempt to ride a bike around Lake Michigan, raising money for West Town Bikes, a bike shop dedicated to supporting youth on the West Side of Chicago.
I fooled around with the idea of teaching after a few of my friends encouraged me to try. I had started putting more time and energy into helping other writers improve. My mother had been a teacher. My brother taught. I have many friends who are teachers. I felt like there was something to it that resonated with me innately.
Carolyn Poplett, my moral compass, in pearls!
At my mother’s memorial last June, one of her friends remembered a motto that epitomized my mother’s moral foundation. It was:
To lift yourself up, lift up those around you.
Though mom ‘s sturdy example ingrained the principal of this motto deep within me, this artful expression of it made it brand new. I already knew the value of the idea. With mom gone, I was that much more eager to put it to use. Soon after a non-profit group that helps kids in the city discover their ability as writers put out a call for volunteers willing to work in their booth at Chicago’s 2022 Printer’s Row Literary Festival. I had taken their training a year earlier, passed a background test, and had been waiting for an assignment ever since. I wanted to establish myself with the org and parlay it into a gig teaching writing and running one of their workshops.
Another great Carolyn motto is:
Whenever somebody asks you to do something, always say yes. You never know where it will take you.
This idea too had worked its way into my being.
I signed up. It was a beautiful day in late spring in downtown Chicago. The festival had its own buzz and energy. It was great to be in the throes of so many books, book lovers, and authors. I bumped into a cherished novelist friend, hawking copies of her first publishing success, The Fourteenth of September, as I had hoped.
I had a brief few moments to learn the pitch for the program, what they expected out of me on that day, and to acquaint myself with my peers who had also committed to the first shift on opening day.
I was soon standing side-by-side with another more experienced person, either a volunteer or a staffer, getting people to sign up for our mailing list or to purchase a book of student poetry and art. As an unpublished author, it was easy to imagine and describe the thrill that young kids would get from reading their own words from the pages of a published book in front of a live audience.
The booth work energized me. I was chatting it up with everybody, the people who approached the booth and the persons I worked with. It seemed like my partner and I were racking up good numbers in book sales and signups. We high fived each other a couple of times. I put my arm around her to get our picture taken together. By the end of our stint, I was happy and satisfied for what we had accomplished.
I felt like I had inched closer to my goal of teaching.
At Goldy’s bar in Forest Park, having a beer with my brother, I failed to choke down a goofy impulse to blurt out how he must be glad that our mother had died. I regretted it immediately not because it was crass but because it reinforced an old script of how he was put upon by his mother.
We were in our cups. I doubled down on my stupidity, warning him “don’t be a victim, bro”, giving him an unsolicited lecture on why he shouldn’t go on blaming mom forever. The evening ended badly. I went home fearing permanently ruptured my relationship with my only brother.
Soon after, the volunteer coordinator sent out a group email looking to recruit a crew to assist in running the annual fall fundraiser charity event. I again want to help, check coats, distribute paddles for the paddle raise, do whatever was called for. I wrote to tell them that I was interested and ready to go.
When I didn’t hear back, I wrote a second email. The coordinator responded saying something vague about background checks which surprised me. They had the results of my original check on file. I found the results on my computer and posted a fresh copy of them to the coordinator. She wrote back to explain that they had already met their quota for volunteers.
Maybe they didn’t need me. Although it was starting to smell fishy, I bought two tickets to the event and proudly invited a new friend to join me, not suspecting there was anything really wrong and wanting at least to support them as a donor and have a fresh chance of getting to meet some of the staff and chat with fellow boosters.
Then, on a Friday, I got an email from the executive director disinviting me from the charity event. He explained that he was rescinding my tickets, having received a report from staff and volunteers of “significant inappropriate behavior”.
It was a rude shock. As accusations go, or quasi-accusations, I had never experienced anything so damning. I was confused, embarrassed, and humiliated. I wondered what people would think I had done to warrant such an extravagant reaction. I couldn’t even explain it to myself. I jumped on the director’s offer to reserve half an hour on his electronic calendar for a one-on-one discussion. I picked a time for the coming Monday.
Over the long weekend, I called friends and family on the phone, confessed my circumstance, and appealed to them for moral support. I called my new friend and suffered the compound embarrassment of having to give her the whole background to the story as a prelude to the explanation of why I had to disinvite her.
The last person I called was my brother. Likely I was more hesitant to tell him my story. He was sympathetic, thoughtful and supporting. He heard me out. But before the call was over, he found a moment to admonish me without a smirk “don’t be a victim, bro.”
Now here was change of the most exquisite kind. The kid brother schooling his know-it-all elder on the finer points of life. The kid brother outsmarting him with a dare to sample his own medicine. The kid brother showing the older brother how to listen.
I woke the next morning, still thinking about that comeback, laughing my head off at this unexpected reversal. Who was doling out advice now? If this was a game of chess, my brother had just taken my queen.
The next day the director confirmed that putting my arm around my booth partner was the crux of the complaint against me. I offered to write a note of apology to that person and entrust it to the director for delivery.
I also offered to write another note to the rest of the volunteers and staff in case some aspect of my behavior had caused them to suffer in some way as well.
We spoke of a future day, in a following month, when we might deem it appropriate to reevaluate my volunteer status.
I wrote a formal apology, addressed to my erstwhile booth partner in an email, asking for her forgiveness for my affront. I did my best to put myself in her shoes. I sent the result to the director the next day and felt good about it.
A few days after that, in a final spasm of agony, I wrote a brief follow-up email to the director thanking him for hearing me out and telling him I felt demoralized and we could drop the idea of reevaluating my volunteer status.
I did not hear from him after that.
The only other complaint leveled against me was an accusation of oversharing. People who know me would readily believe this charge. I don’t deny that I am in the eyes of many an over-sharer. Hell, a lot of people I know are under-sharers and I don’t hold that against them. I just don’t feel oversharing should be a source of shame. If somebody accuses me of oversharing and what they’re really doing is euphemistically telling me, I’m a bore… fine. Go ahead and shoot me. But if not, then it might mean that all I’ve really done is lead a longer and more interesting life than most folks.
Coda
This story was developed and presented at the first Voice Box performance of 2023 at Fitzgerald’s Nightclub in Berwyn, II. Our theme for the evening was “changes”, as inspired by the David Bowie song.
It was the fall of 2014. I had returned from a delirious trip to my first writer’s retreat in North Carolina, not knowing that my mother, Carolyn, had dementia. I had clues, two of her siblings had already died from it, but denial being the stock and trade of the human race, I gallantly did my best to ignore them. Then, I smacked into convincing evidence.
I crashed a confab that Carolyn and Mariya, her caregiver, were having in her bright, sunny kitchen. Even when she had seen me the day before, she always exuded joy and delight at the sight of me as if I was the prodigal son at long last finally coming home.
“Oh, John,” she said, “it’s you!”
She very cheerfully started to sing,
No, you can’t chop your mother up in Massachusetts.
Not even if you’re tired off her cuisine.
Now, I had it, finally. Proof. Mom was losing it. That song was whack.
“Mom, what’s the song you’re singing.”
“Oh, we’ve got it right here on a CD.”
“Really?”
“Oh, yes. I’m sure.”
There were stacks of CDs in her kitchen, elbowed in next to China plates and spices in cupboards. But I needed to know and started to dig. Mariya joined me in the hunt. We went through all of them. Truth of it was, I really didn’t know what I was looking for.
There was a pause for lunch. I confessed to Carolyn that we couldn’t find the song she’d been singing on any of her CDs. It seemed grim, like her sanity was hanging in the balance.
“It wouldn’t be on a phonograph record? The one’s you left behind at your old place.”
“No, it’s right here in the kitchen.”
“Are you sure, mom?”
“Oh, yes. I saw the musical with your father on Broadway in 1952.”
What was she saying? This could be a story to fill in the gaps in her memory. Carolyn permitted nothing, NOT even dementia, to catch her out without a story. Her nature abhorred a vacuum, a narrative vacuum most of all. There was always a story to tell.
I was panicked, not prepared to face the idea that mom had a brain disease when the name “Lizzie Borden” came to mind. Searching the web, I found that a film had debuted in 1954 starring Eartha Kitt and Paul Lynde among others.
But I had trodden a long way down the path of proving mom nuts—why, I wonder, there was no profit in it—and now I clung onto this pathetic shred of evidence that she was mistaken and there had never been a musical, as she had claimed, but a movie instead. Why she was WRONG!
None of this stopped my eye from trailing down to the bottom of the Wikipedia page, explaining that the film was based on the musical, also starring Eartha Kitt and Paul Lynde, which was first performed on Broadway in 1952. And that musical had a song in its repertoire named “Lizzy Borden”.
And the lyrics to that song went like this:
But you can't chop your momma up in Massachusetts Not even if you're tired of her cuisine (Her cuisine) No, you can't chop your momma up in Massachusetts You know it's almost sure to cause a scene
Later I learned that mom had served on the board of a local charity with Sheila Mack, another go-getter like mom, adored by many. A few weeks before the CD hunt, her deranged daughter and daughter’s boyfriend had bludgeoned her to death, stuffed her in a suitcase, and left her body in a resort hotel in Bali before lighting out for a casino.
If the cruelest circumstances are those that tempt us to abandon our ideals, this was a cruel circumstance. Sheila Mack had adopted a mentally damaged daughter with different skin tone. I wondered briefly if mom was ever tempted to blame the murder of her friend on so-called race. Carolyn had fought for over fifty years for civil rights and mental health with unfailing tenacity. Her causes were as vital to her as breathing. Instead, as on this occasion, she found solace in song. This reflex came very naturally to my mother not just to sing but to know exactly the right song to sing and to remember all the lyrics.
When Carolyn was in hospice, at home, shortly before she died, I found the CD. It was a typical score. Southern mom: 1, Yankee son: zero.
