Platform
Q: If you have served as Poet Laureate of the United States, are a distinguished professor of poetry somewhere, have won grants and prizes and publication by small presses subsidized by the NEA, and have appeared on Garrison Keillor several times, you might get a book of poems published by a New York publisher.
A: Yes.
“Are you a painter?”
“No, I’m a writer.”
“I meant a housepainter.”
“I meant a technical writer.”
Size 13WWW brogans with paint on them.
Bukowski got
published by
Q: Have you queried David Godine.
A: Yes. They don’t read unagented material.
Q: John Martin said there is an outsider tradition in American writing that goes back to Thoreau and Whitman.
A: Yes. It’s hard to find an outsider if you don’t look at unagented material.
Q: What if one comes to you, and says he’s one.
A: That’s what he would day. Talk is cheap.
Q: Your credentials in the underground are impressive.
A: Thank you.
That and 25¢ will buy me a cup of coffee.
Q: Not at Starbucks.
A: Leo Genn played Starbuck in Moby-Dick. Thoreau, Whitman, and Melville.
Q: Your brother Bill had a leaping porpoise tattooed on one shoulder. It said Billy Buck.
A: Robert Ryan played Claggart in Billy Budd.
Q: When Melville died, he left Billy Budd in a tin box. Apropos of leaving works in boxes.
A: I will leave my stack in a tin shed. A rented storage shed.
Q: Is that sad, to you?
A: We don’t dwell on it.
Rejection slips are sad.
Writing is a sad business.
Q: Hemingway couldn’t finish A Moveable Feast.
A: His wife finished it for him.
Q: Some people believe he killed himself because he could no longer write.
Writing was his raison d’être, and he couldn’t do it anymore.
A: Be glad you can still do it.
Blessed is the man who’s found his work.
Daily Typewriting: The Last Six Months of my 39th Year is A Moveable Feast and A Room of One’s Own. Virginia Woolf committed suicide.
And The Summing Up.
Q: Maugham died of old age. In a bed.