I had to explain poetry to my therapist. Or rather, the Poetry Business. And I told her I felt like I wasn’t getting anywhere. Where do you want to be? asked my therapist. What’s the dream?
Well, I explained to her, in poetry, you get published, then you’re supposed to try for the next tier of journals and presses. You climb the ladder.
She paused and considered her words. Climb. To what?
My finger hovered over that red “Leave Session” button. I wanted to dismiss her, knowing she didn’t get poetry—she wasn’t one of us. But things were not great. I was having terrifying panic attacks. In the midst of kicking benzos, I felt like my body was on fire all the time. My family was going through crisis after crisis. My job made me miserable. So it’s not like hanging up on the therapist would get me to a better place. I’d still be a wreck, but I’d have to vacuum. At some point, when everything around you is a blade, you just pick one to lean into. I sighed and stayed on the call. She had asked a question I dreaded, the equivalent of asking rich people how much money is enough. Because like a rich person, I could not possibly answer. I don’t want to be like rich people.
So. The climb.
I was a chubby, unathletic kid with an embarrassing speech impediment, thanks to having lost all four front teeth when I was not yet two years old—and the gummy, toothless smile of course added to the total package. But I was smart. I dove into learning because I loved it. Before long, I learned that excelling at school also opened the door to all kinds of positive feedback I was so sorely lacking elsewhere. The more I achieved, the more attention I got. If other kids were assholes to me, I could at least relish the approval of adults. And thus, I started chasing the high of accolades, certificates, rankings, grade points.
Years later, when I fell in love with poetry, sometime around junior high, my dedication to writing grew symbiotically with a need for validation. The minute I found out it existed, I ordered Writer’s Market from the Read-Mor. My parents sighed but kept buying stamps and envelopes. Later, of course, we all went online, and simultaneous submissions flooded every market. I kept going. Each acceptance was…acceptance. Every time someone recognized my poetry in a positive way, I won a moment of feeling like I had value. Like each little victory was a ticket from an arcade game, and eventually I’d be able to walk up to the counter and buy myself the giant stuffed panda that would give me some inner fucking peace.
It’s a scam, that game.
Because the flipside is this: each rejection was rejection. I tended to handle rejection with a tunneling inward, a self-flagellating desire to retreat. According to conventional poetry wisdom, though, any sadness should be redirected into hustle. I should heal the pain of rejection by trying harder. Rejected by three journals? Send to 30. Carpet bomb the database listings of open journals, playing that odds that someone will accept you. Anyone will do–though there are of course the elite venues that give true credibility. Until then, keep grinding. Turns out I wasn’t even handling rejection right.
A few weeks further along in my work with the therapist, I was running late after a dentist appointment. She was talking up at me from the small screen of my cell phone, which sat in a cup holder as I drove home. I told her I couldn’t look at her because I was driving, but I hadn’t wanted to miss the appointment. I don’t know if she sensed an opening in my distraction—like she knew my defenses weren’t working—or if she just decided that was the day to casually shatter me. After I discussed another poetry failure, she stopped me: Jessica. Have you ever considered that you might be good?
Pause. I thought she might have looked up my work and been impressed. But she went on, Not a good poet, or even a good mom or good professor or good daughter? What if you are good because you are, and you never need to prove it to yourself or anyone else?
There was a silence as I processed everything she had just asked me. In my head, I saw the questions on a page, and I kept re-reading. I stammered. I tried some performative response, ready to move along rather than stay in this deeply uncomfortable space. But she just didn’t buy it.
No, I need you to really answer.
I pulled the car into the parking lot of a Polish deli and absolutely fell apart. Fuck.
I didn’t know how to see myself as a being, not a role. I definitely didn’t think of myself as being worth love or life or anything good unless I could be good at those roles. If I’m not being judged on how well I write or nurture or lecture, what am I? And if I do have value entirely apart from achievements, why am I putting so much weight on them?
Take away publication lists, award counts. Take away titles and the blurbs they wield. Take away best-of lists. Take away sales figures and honoraria. Take away social media shares. Take away compliments. Take away tiers of journals or rejections. Take away ambition. Leave only the words, unseen. Does my poetry matter? Does yours?
No, I need you to really answer.
I need to apologize to hermits. I’ve always rolled my eyes at the mention of hermits or desert dwellers, the dudes (pretty much always dudes) who hole themselves up and just pray. Their lives seemed like a waste. After all, if they had such faith, why not get out there and do some good with it? Preach, heal, share. Show off those blessings. Get out of your goddamn cave.
What never occurred to me was that a hermit might not want anything beyond his goddamn cave. That he could actually be joyful. He could be in there merging with his faith, expressing it through prayer that no human will hear, and in doing so, he could feel what didn’t exist in the cave itself or the world beyond it: fullness. The hermit lives in the thing itself. No one tells him he’s doing great, that he’s the Best American Hermit or won the Hermit Nobel Prize. And he doesn’t desire that, because he knows already that no external validation can fill a desperate emptiness. Nothing but the thing. For him, prayer.
The poems.
I drag myself daily through the process of re-understanding that my poetry only matters if only poetry matters. I want to relate to poetry the way the hermit relates to prayer. I sit down to write and try to believe that the moments when I am deep into words are all that matters. My body tells me this is right. When I’m writing, I lose track of time. I forget the hot coffee beside me until long after it’s cold. My shoulders warm and relax. It’s a kind of fullness that I don’t get anywhere else in my life.
Not to say I’m trying to die alone in a cave of poetry. But I need to make the Poetry Business truly secondary to poetry. This is an ugly process, I admit. It means I have to back up from a lot of online drama about poetry, the kind of stuff that sucks me into identifying with my position. I have to slow down and recognize when I’m looking outward. I will absolutely fuck this up. I’m in the process of divorcing my sense of self from my list of achievements. The divorce is not amicable. Necessary, though.
There’s no shortage of irony in the fact that as I was in the midst of articulating my very unadorned version of art-for-art’s-sake, a poem from my newest book went viral. I didn’t do anything to make this happen. Another poet shared a poem, and it caught, and it spread. I found myself mystified and grateful and also calm, distanced. What a gift, I thought, to see people connecting through it. And the private emails or message I received from around the world were bursts of joy for me as I saw people celebrating their own survival.
But at the end of the day, it’s a poem I wrote because I remembered how I made a promise to my friend Amy a few years ago that I would stay alive. How she and I have both changed over nearly 30 years of friendship. How often life had seemed to want us dead, and yet here we were. I wrote it in the garage during a freezing day of the pandemic, sitting in my parka on a lawn chair next to a space heater. It’s deeply personal, very specific, and if I ever imagined an audience, it was me and Amy, in our early 20s, passionately throwing ourselves at bad ideas and laughing hysterically at the women we would become. Writing it gave me a window into the possibility that we matter because we are here. We’ve got nothing to prove. I was telling myself in that poem what my therapist would tell me a couple years later. I don’t need to overachieve my way towards a life that matters.
As the poem circulated, a few truly well-meaning people offered advice on how to capitalize on the success of the poem, how to create a brand and turn this into other opportunities. But that’s not what my gut was telling me to do. What I’d originally told myself in the poem, what my therapist was trying to get me to actually hear, is that my gut can be trusted. I have undoubtedly missed chances to elevate myself in the Poetry Business. I’m okay with that.
As I finish writing this, I don’t know what or who it’s for. I’m not sure I’ll share it at all, and if I do, I don’t know how or where. I’m writing, the coffee’s gone cold, my shoulders are relaxed. I’m good.
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Jessica L. Walsh is the author of Book of Gods and Grudges (Glass Lyre Press, 2022) as well as other collections. Her work can be found in Rogue Agent, Lunch Ticket, RHINO, Bear Review, Cotton Xenomorph, and more. She teaches at a community college outside of Chicago but spends as much time as possible in her rural Michigan hometown.