Yesterday I got an email from a poet friend that began: “I hope all is well with you and your poetry, not that the two are really separable.”
I was struck by this line. Am I separable from my poetry? What does the assumption behind that statement mean? At first glance, the statement made perfect sense. To some extent my very well being depends on the health of my writing practice. This logic can apply to any type of artist, writer, musician, actor.
But on second thought, as artists and writers we are separate from our work. If we become too identified with the artistic process we may develop an unhealthy relationship to it that can hinder it. If my writing a poem is all about “me” it may never reach beyond “me.” And if I’m writing poems for egotistical reasons, they probably won’t turn out any good anyway.
My friend’s statement had further resonance. I recently created a fundraising campaign to help fund my poetry book-in-progress about climate change. I really hesitated before deciding to go ahead and create that campaign, as I’ve outlined here. No one likes to ask for money. No one wants to annoy their friends and family for money––let alone acquaintances and strangers.
It wasn’t just that I’d never done a fundraising campaign before, so had no experience to build on. What was much harder for me was the feeling that I was asking money for myself. You often see fundraising campaigns that support a worthy organization or charity or that help fund a start-up business or product in development. But for some reason the idea that artists and writers need money to support the production of their art and writing is seen differently. Society still tends to view art as a hobby. There is very little money in this country for the arts.
Who was I to presume that anyone would take me seriously enough to support my venturing out into the woods to write poems?
The assumption here was that my writing poems is intimately tied up with “me.” On a deep level, of course this is true. My writing comes from my experience of being in the world, and is inseparable from that. But so is everything. Every business, product, idea arises from a human being interacting with their environment. But poetry? Somehow it’s viewed as more interconnected to the poet’s personality and whims.
But poetry is work. All art is work.
It can be liberating when you’re stuck on a particularly difficult creative project to try to extricate your “self” from it. The poem is not me. It’s on the page. It’s something I’m making.
When I told my husband that I felt uncomfortable with the idea of asking for money for my project, he said something that changed my perspective. He said that people won’t be donating money to me, they’ll be donating money to help me create my book. Therefore, my campaign is really no different from investing in the development of a product––except that my product, like all poetry books, won’t yield tons of money as a reward. But it will yield poetry, which, of course, is priceless.