HOW YOU DO // Merrill Cole
HOW YOU DO is a sporadic feature on the H_NGM_N tumblr asking all & sundry the big questions. Click here to find out more about the series and keep reading for a post by Merrill Cole //
Pride and Prejudice and Publication
In the early nineties, “trellis” seemed to me the magic poetry word. A friend of the poet might blurb the back of his book, calling it the “trellis” of an exquisite something or other. I discovered “trellis” in poem after poem. It came to connote for me a world of suburban praisefulness, a world to which, with my anger and punk aesthetic, I knew I could not belong.
The professor in charge of poetry at the tiny liberal arts college I attended in Florida did not much care for my poems; and so, for my undergraduate thesis, I wrote a novella under the direction of a more sympathetic faculty member. But then, admittance into the MFA poetry program at Cornell University in 1990—the fiction program passed me over—seemed to revalidate the poetic aspiration I had held since high school.
Shortly before I left Florida for upstate New York, the results of my third HIV test came back positive. At the time, HIV was considered “almost invariably fatal.” Yet I didn’t waver for a moment in my commitment to attend graduate school. A college idealist, I believed that academic study concerned intellect and acquiring knowledge, and that creative writing concerned making art.
Archie Ammons and Phyllis Janowicz advocated that we simply appreciate the ample time the MFA gave us to write, but I found this advice difficult to follow. From chatter among my MFA peers, I had come to understand that publication was very, very important. No one would get anywhere in creative writing without it.
So I began sending lots of poems to lots of magazines. I do mean a lot, even if I was enough of a patsy never to submit simultaneously. I had plenty of material. Some weeks, I composed as many as five new poems. Not a single poem was accepted.
I was a member of the editorial staff of Cornell’s literary magazine, Epoch. An editor from another little magazine suggested he would publish me if Epoch would publish him. This attempted trade-off was one of many little disillusionments that led to the bleak depression of my second year at Cornell. I decided not to advance to the English Ph.D. My plan was to move to New York City, get a dumb job, and become active in the local poetry scene.
Several months later, I was accepted into an artist’s co-op in the East Village, Café Nico (now defunct). I went to poetry readings and other artistic events, but the joy of living in Manhattan was slowly beaten out of me by the abysmally stupid job choice I made.
Banker’s Trust New York Corporation, impressed by my Ivy League 4.0, offered a position at far higher pay than I had been led to expect. The headhunter presented it as a one-of-a-kind opportunity. I did not tell my interviewers how it was almost impossible not to get an “A” in a Cornell graduate class.
If Cornell had not been a great place for me, Wall Street turned out far worse. It felt almost as though I were back in high school. Overtime at Banker’s Trust was expected most weeks. It turned out, I really didn’t like what the bank did. There were pamphlets in the office that alarmed me concerning how best to exploit Eastern European labor. In their free moments, my coworkers found nothing to discuss but the previous night’s situation comedies. My boss, seeing my hangdog look, said, “No one really wants to work here. We’re all just doing it for the money.”
I left work feeling tired almost every day. I began getting sicker. The bankers began to scheme to get rid of me, once they figured out I was gay.
Although a friend of the poet managing Café Nico published two of my poems in her magazine, I did not feel I really belonged on the New York poetry scene. It seemed to me the other poets were working in the Beat tradition, and I certainly was not.
I decided to reapply to Ph.D. programs.
During my first year in the English program at the University of Washington, I had an academic essay accepted for publication. At around the same time, my health took a U-turn for the better.
The readers who judged “The Purloined Mirror” had no idea who I was; they could only go by the quality of the argument. My Poe essay was the first of a string of academic publications, which made me proud of myself, but also served to increase my distance from the poetry world.
Although I continued to compose poems sporadically, in 1994, I completely stopped sending them out to magazines.
Then, a decade later, I received an unusual call for papers in my inbox. It concerned a peer-reviewed, double-blind creative writing online magazine (now defunct). I was intrigued and decided to submit.
My poem was accepted, and my appetite was whetted. I searched hard and found another peer-reviewed literary magazine starting up in the UK, which took several of my poems.
After this, I hit an impasse. I loved seeing the poems in print, but I could find no more peer-reviewed options. I knew I would have to plunge into the world of regular literary magazines where I suspected names mattered more than poetic quality and people published their friends.
Today, as a tenured Associate Professor at a Midwest regional university, my career is at least a qualified success. In the deplorable national situation in which only a quarter of academic faculty make it to the tenure line, I have job security, a reasonable teaching load, and decent pay.
The biggest problem is that I am forever a city boy. I don’t enjoy living in the middle of the corn and soybean fields.
I have a strong academic publication record. My writing is sought after: I find myself again and again asked to contribute a talk, an essay, even a book.
Since I began again submitting to regular literary magazines, I have received uncountable rejections, almost all of them form letters. Yet all the same, I have managed to publish almost enough poems to put together a book.
The problem is, I don’t see how that book will ever get into print. I wish I could say that this doesn’t upset me, or that thinking about it hasn’t ruined a number of good days. I’ve seen other writers hussle their way into book publication. I’m happy for them, but that’s not me. It’s not only that I don’t know how to do it, but that I don’t have the heart for it.
I miss giving poetry readings. Were I to publish a book of poems, I might get an audience again, beyond what I receive within the confines of my university.
Sometimes, I’ve tried to work out my ambivalence about poetry in actual poems. “Candy Man,” published in Trickhouse, http://www.trickhouse.org/vol9/writers/merrillcole.html, opens,
He cannot blame it
for the murder, though the story
clings to what he loves
like cancer. Otherwise the
half-eaten legs would bend
beyond what he can bear, he
never tasting the reward.
It seems I can’t give up the story of being a poet. I keep writing poems, but I’m unable simply to bask in the joy of writing them.
I think of the opening of Louise Glück’s “Hyacinth”:
Is that an attitude for a flower, to stand
like a club at the walk; poor slain boy,
is that a way to show
gratitude to the gods?
To this day, I wince when I encounter a “trellis.”
Merrill Cole is Associate Professor of English at Western Illinois University. He is the author of The Other Orpheus: A Poetics of Modern Homosexuality, as well as numerous essays and poems. His translation from the German of Anita Berber and Sebastian Droste's Dances of Vice, Horror, and Ecstasy was published in 2012 by Side Real Press.
