fuck the bread

I've been slowly listening to audio books as I make, well, actual physical books instead of my usual youtube watching, most recently Sabrina Orah Mark's HAPPILY, which takes on fairytales through a contemporary lens. She has been one of my fave contemporary poets ever since someone in a class recommended I read The Babies in grad school, and I caught bits of the book as essays in The Paris Review, where she was publishing them pretty regularly the last few years. They were all amazing, of course, and just the sort of fairytale nonsense I adore. However one of them may have well changed completely how I thought about the pandemic world and what came after.  So much so that I kept posting it on facebook multiple times every time I encountered the link to get folks to read it all that rest of 2020.

As I was listening to it this time read aloud a few days ago, however, I was so aware of how much it probably changed my approach to poetry and poetry business and the literary world. It was actually a mantra I say sometimes when considering poetry-related things and where to invest my efforts. Fuck the bread. Granted, they were shifts that I was feeling over the years, and maybe shifts I was always working toward, but the essay sort of set me free of some preconceptions and expectations I always had in navigating a world I never really felt at home in.  In Mark's case, she is perhaps she is more talking about the academic world, but in some ways for me, the academic is wound with the creative, at least as I have experienced it the past three decades of writing and publishing. 

Maybe just the attitude that for every door you knock on, for every acceptance or entry granted, there is another that bars the way. There are rooms you will just never be able to get into. Not only will there not be a way to get in, but possibly secret doors that are accessible only by handshakes and code words. That the world is set up with system of rankings and hierarchies and bottlenecks.  Certain utterances and opinions grant entrances, draw people to you, while others will send them fleeing. Certain agreements can be made and favors to be traded. You may follow all the maps and guidelines and think that eventually you will find a destination you feel comfortable only to find yourself back at the beginning, or worse, trampled underfoot. 

And of course, the gist of the essay is that it doesn't matter. Fuck the bread. The bread is over. If the world doesn't suit you, maybe its time for a new one. Or at least a new path in a different direction. In late 2020,  I made a pact with myself that I wouldn't let certain attitudes and constraints stop me from doing what I basically wanted to do..share my work with the people who were interested. Find new and engaged readers at the most. I'm not particularly interested in awards or fellowships or reviews or book sales rankings. More readers are nice. But I'm not even sure these things bring them beyond a glimmer of attention that gets lost in the general glow and fade. Fuck the bread. It doesn't actually make you any less hungry. Maybe they are good to leave as crumbs for others to find you, but they can also be gobbled up by birds.  

I somehow found myself in my own weird funk during the pandemic and afterward even while writing poems like crazy. But I almost stopped writing as I finished each project. The fear that hit me in March 2020, over getting sick, losing income, not being able to survive made me question why I was investing so much time and energies into something that was not really satisfying me at all.  Part of this was my job, of course, though I didn't know it.  But even outside that, as I struggled financially, I almost stopped bothering. To write, to send out work, Why bother?  Who cares? 

It wasn't the poetry's fault, of course, that was completely unfair. The poems aren't the problem. And it couldn't be the money, because, god knows, there wasn't any. But what was it--the hoops, the hierarchies, the unspoken rules and systems that make absolutely no sense to anyone outside the systems? I was in a strange place, having just released a traditionally published book at the height of the lockdowns, one that actually did well in sales figures compared to my other titles with the same press, but though I loved my publisher and the book, it felt hollow in a way I couldn't explain. And maybe it was the pandemic or maybe it was just me. We all got a dose of feeling like we were much more mortal than we'd had been before. Why shouldn't we want the things we want and do the things we want to do? Before the next terrible thing that will certainly kill us strikes--plagues, war, climate change? Before it's too late?

In early 2021, I self-published my book-length collection, FEED, then another. Then more in 2022 and now another one, whose lovely little proof copy is sitting here beside me as I write this. My newer books actually sell reasonably well given my tiny little corner here and my small, but dedicated readers who I love. Enough to keep publishing more, which is the point. I guess I write a lot. Daily almost unless I'm just editing. I know how to make books and edit galleys and design covers, so it's the most natural thing in the world to me and feels really good. Even after having been very fortunate to have had other presses take chances on me for book-length projects. But they honestly can't publish as much as I write, and I really want to share it all--I'm greedy/exhibitionistic like that. In Instagram posts and blogs and reels and e-zines, but also in books. That's the point--not the climbing and the hitting the marks and signposts, but sharing the work. The bread, while nice, is not the point. You can take it or leave it. But don't put your survival as an artist on the bread. The bread is dead. 

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