Dropped by the restaurant yesterday to give Javier a copy of Poets & Writers magazine. He had mentioned on Monday that he had written some short stories and didn't know where to send them. I showed him the section in the back that listed organizations that give awards and grants.
"Most of them are for poetry though," I told him. "You should become a poet."
"I hate poets," he said. "I mean, I hate when you ask someone and they say, 'I'm a poet,' and they haven't published anything."
It's true that poetry attracts more hacks than even travel writing. You jot down a few lines and you're a poet. It's the literary form that is the most capacious, accommodating (if not embracing) Sunday versifiers and Nobel prize winners. (Where's the Nobel laureate travel writer? Naipaul is the closest we come.) Poets win genius awards (Campbell McGrath) and read their work on television (Billy Collins), though he then gets described, in Nicholson Baker's new novel, as a "charming chirping crack whore."
I told Javier that Friday I was going to Books & Books to hear a friend read his poetry. "My feeling," he said, "is: that's why we have music." And I remembered hearing James Atlas at the Miami Book Fair one year reminiscing about going to poetry readings in his youth in New York City and how the six most beautiful words in the English language were: "And now for my last poem."
