What Success Is (and What It Isn’t)

Poet Lindsey Alexander reading from Rodeo in Reverse at Union Ave Books in Knoxville the day Dr. Christine Blasey-Ford spoke before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Me reading at Union Ave Books in Knoxville the day Dr. Christine Blasey-Ford spoke before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

I have friends who would say success is getting your first book published, preferably with a prize. Have a prize? A more prestigious prize. Have a prestigious prize? A more prestigious award. You can see how the bar moves.

To me, success is a bar that is level, clearing that bar. A bar I choose. Success to me is about setting one bar at a time, not sitting surrounded by bars.

My success is not a cage; my success is what I leap toward. The past couple weeks on my book tour, success has looked like:

  • Talking to a student about her career path after a class
  • Having someone ask to see a copy of a new poem I’d written after reading it
  • Answering some questions honestly and pithily after a reading
  • Watching Dr. Christine Blasey-Ford testify and then making it to a reading anyway
  • Having a woman at that reading tell me I’d read her favorite poem
  • Connecting with my friends
  • With my family’s help, creating a livable space in my basement (it was just junk in boxes)
  • Scheduling an oil change
  • Not picking fights with my husband
  • Making a good meal from ingredients we already had in the house
  • Making my pub day a day to bake and spend time with a friend, rather than trawl social media or plan a big party that would stress me out
  • When I completely spaced an appointment, apologizing and letting it go

My favorite quote about success is from Maya Angelou. I’ve shared it before, and I’ll share it again: “Success is liking who you are, liking what you do, and liking how you do it.”

Yes, sometimes success is champagne floats. (I do recommend raspberry sorbet for that, by the way.) It’s effervescent and bubbling to the top, it’s beautiful and too sacred for Instagram. It’s holding a book in your hands, or a manuscript, or thirty drawings when you thought you couldn’t finish anything. It’s a scale progression you’ve finally nailed or transitioning between chords with ease for the first time. It’s a promotion, it’s talking to someone you don’t know at a party, it’s seeing your person succeed, it’s having dinner with your parents and realizing just then how much you love them and how much you are loved. It’s stopping to watch the butterflies on the bush you planted for them a year ago. It’s a slow dance in your dining room on a Saturday afternoon—just you.

We tend to write off our everyday successes (or I do), which makes us ill-equipped to see our big ones when they come. I’m trying to revel more in them. Especially the successes that might not look like success at all to someone else.

Sometimes success isn’t glamorous—and I don’t quite mean the hard work behind a finished product. I mean sometimes the world is ugly and success is ugly, too. Sometimes success is sharing with someone you love that you’ve been hurt. Sometimes success is warning women colleagues about your harasser when you hear he’s in their orbit. Sometimes success is having developed the tools to not have a panic attack when you hear an abuser’s name in passing. Sometimes success is faceplanting on the couch so that you don’t go out and self-destruct or self-medicate. Sometimes success is admitting to yourself that you’ve been hurt and that you didn’t deserve to be hurt; it’s letting yourself cry after years of promising yourself you wouldn’t. Sometimes it’s recognizing hurt you’ve caused and contemplating how to pay restitution. It’s laughing after all this when you accidentally break a keepsake, sweeping it up, and hoping you’ll glue it back together somehow. Sometimes success is “jumping in front of a train that was heading to where it was heading anyway.”*

In the American literary scene, we are in a season of awards and lists that people like to argue over. I understand why: They help careers, give visibility to writers, can give assurance that’s much needed when an artist feels at a breaking point, and also, most people have very little taste if left to their own devices—if something wins an award, they can feel comfortable calling it good. I’m happy for kind artists who win awards pretty much regardless of whether I like their writing—mostly because it’s nice when nice things happen to nice people. (And the inverse of this is also true for me—not liking when mean or cruel people or known abusers win these awards pretty much regardless of whether I like their writing.) Sometimes great works are awarded, sometimes they are passed over for lesser ones. An award doesn’t change the original quality of a work. And somehow, work keeps getting done with or without this validation.

If we come up with our own terms for success, as Dr. Angelou suggests, then it is maybe less surprising when worldly success is bestowed to those who are undeserving—the sycophants, the posers, and infinitely worse, our abusers, our nightmares, our Brett Kavanaughs—and that we must argue over who “success” is bestowed upon, whether it’s an award or an inevitability—an entitlement, and what success means. Often, success is just a word for putting bars around others, passing a bar, a baton, between only a few people. (The bars others set for us—by design or by circumstance—usually aren’t level.)

It can be painful to realize people I care about don’t share my definition of success—that a violent felony is a rite of passage, for instance, and not disqualifying, the strange idea that a personal failing should not affect a professional success. (Especially as I’m of the first Facebook generation, where we were urged not to post anything—even a questionable joke or a red Solo cup—as teenagers that might haunt us throughout our careers.)

Having a definition of success for myself doesn’t make the world more just—it doesn’t lessen my tears. It doesn’t make me a good person. (Dang it!) But it does lighten my load. It makes me accountable to myself.

How?

I like who I am, I like what I do, and I like how I do it. (And when I realize I’ve fallen short, I change what I’m doing and how I’m doing it to match the person I know I am.)

I may be wrong, but I do not think the Kavanaughs like who they are, what they do, and how they do it. (If they did, would they deny who they are, what they do, and how they do it? Do they even begin to know who they are?) This belief, this self-love, may be the only justice we get.

*What Dr. Blasey-Ford said of her reluctance to come forward sooner.

Poems I’ve Loved This Month: October 2017

Blue Monochrome by Yves Klein, which is a canvas filled with an exact shade of ultramarine blue, 1961. The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

“Indigo” by Ellen Bass.

This poem immediately struck me with the whoosh of needing to re-read—not because it’s overly complex or difficult to understand, but because of the simplicity of its narrative, the longing so many of us have for some other life, granted “it’s a miracle to have a life. Any life at all.” Desire for a tattooed dad turns into desire of a totally different sort (or maybe not a different sort at all, but the desire behind the desire, behind the cobweb and the window and its screen, the thing itself, outside and wild, but also suburban, typical, banal aching. I especially love the way she describes what sets this man apart—what his tattoos, which include the indigo of a title, represent to her:

“I want to have married a man who wanted
to be in a body, who wanted to live in it so much
that he marked it up like a book, underlining,
highlighting, writing in the margins, I was here.

Then there’s the title, kind of an Yves Klein monochrome print thing happening, “a kind of obsession,” as Bass might put it. I listened to an episode Abbi Jacobson’s podcast all about Klein’s work with ultramarine blue, how he was fascinated by it and wanted to exactly replicate it on canvas; he found it irresistible and mentioned wanting to “impregnate” viewers with the color. (Oh men.) Klein also composed “The Monotone Symphony,” which is about 20 minutes of an orchestra playing one note followed by about 20 minutes of silence. (Jacobson reveals this after a conversation with QuestLove about the B-flat quality he attributes to Klein’s Blue Monochrome.)

One great thing about language is how its user, like a musician, chooses to wield silence. What’s not in a poem often feels as present as what is. In “Indigo,” there’s a great transition, a turn toward the end, between the speaker/mother and her daughter:

“And now there’s everything that we can’t talk about.
We love—but cannot take
too much of each other.”

What the silence holds for this speaker can’t be kept silent.

I think of Bass and her indigo; despite the many things happening in this poem, doesn’t she offer a compelling monochrome print here, one moment washed in one color that transfixes? Within this indigo, there’s humor, dress shopping, jealousy, “radiance,” BBQ, “carnelian,” even the reds tinged blue. And oddly, like Klein’s ultramarine wish, the poem has much to do with pregnancy—literal and figurative, the speaker’s birth and her daughter’s birth and what comes to fruition in life.

I read recently that a beech tree puts out 1.8 million* beechnuts over the course of its lifetime and only one of those will grow to maturation. In one color, so many ways to strike the same note; what returns to us (repeat desires, images, conversations) returns tired and fresh, old and new, something borrowed, something blue.

*I originally had the incorrect number here.

“Sunshower” by Natalie Shapero.*

This poem contends with the devil we know.

In the midst of a barrage of sexual harassment and assault news, this poem is a beacon. Playing on the old wives’ tale explaining a sunshower (“Some people say the devil is beating / his wife”), the poem morphs the devil again and again into something less and less easy to distance ourselves from, making him both more familiar and more sinister.

This is a great example of a poem that deploys anaphora to build a poem’s complexity. It adds a sing-song musicality that lifts the folktale aspect up and undercuts the rhetoric we’ve all heard before while enhancing it and adding humor.

The anaphora may also point to the culprit; ultimately, the poem doesn’t end with the devil we call devil but with “some people … having a fair.”

“… Some people
say calm down; this is commonplace.
Some people say calm down;
this is very rare. Some people say
the sun is washing her face. Some
people say in Hell, they’re having a fair.”

“Nashville” by Tiana Clark.

At a concert I was at, the singer began with “This is a song about gentrification.” I could hardly keep my eyes from rolling out of my head; in my experience when a writer (of songs or of anything) has to tell you what something is about, it’s no bueno. But then that person wound up being Courtney Marie Andrews, and I’ve listened to her album Honest Life almost every day since.

“Nashville” begins as a poem about gentrification: what changes and what doesn’t. I’d say which history is lost, but this poem keeps history alive, refuses to bury it. It begins with Hot Chicken, which may seem trivial to non-Tennesseeans; but at a time when the South is conversely being identified with a stereotyped white Southerner and appropriated in culture (from dress to cuisine to music), Hot Chicken’s popularity is on the rise, and in this “farm-to-table” migration, it’s been whitewashed, not recalling:

“the history of Jefferson Street or Hell’s
Half Acre, north of downtown. Where freed slaves lived

on the fringe of Union camps, built their own new country.
Where its golden age brought the Silver Streak, a ballroom
bringing Basie, Ellington, and Fitzgerald.”

In the city’s recent boom, Clark razes the past, a brief racial history of Nashville, and the speaker’s more personal history, her great-grandmother Freelove, her grandmother Toy, and her husband being called an epithet in present day. This poem talks about what “bisects” the city, the speaker, and ultimately America: I-40, I-65, “the boomerang shape of the Niger River,” the white faces in a photo of a  black person being lynched. It explores the violence and violations of making lines and of redrawing and crossing them. Maybe the most amazing part of the poem is when the speaker imagines (or sees) the crossing of an uncrossable line—the past entering its future, the present, backwards through the lens:

“…black-and-white lynching photographs,
mute faces, red finger pointing up at my dead, some smiling,

some with hats and ties—all business, as one needlelike lady
is looking at the camera, as if looking through the camera, at me,
in the way I am looking at my lover now—halcyon and constant.”

The speaker “search[es] the OED for soot-covered roots” and yet the epithet hurled at her family from a passerby, a part of the Nashville scene, leaves her hunting, “the breath / of Apollo panting at the back of Daphne’s hair, chasing words”, rootless, “kissing all the trees,” what to ground her but history, her knowledge, maybe love, repeating “Who said it?

I’m grateful for this poem for a number of reasons, but particularly as a person relatively new to Tennessee (though I’ve been in “herds of squealing pink bachelorette parties” and had “sour to balance prismatic, flame-colored spice / for white people”) who knows little of its history and is learning how and where to look for it. Her work consistently teaches me this and so much else.

“Guerilla Theory” by Kien Lam.

“The largest primate in the world
is the white man’s ego.”

Simply put, I love this poem. It’s hard for me to talk about because it moves so quickly, deftly, shapeshifting imperceptibly until one recognizes a new name must enter in, more like clouds that look like monkeys than a gorilla. It’s form, the skinny single stanza, adds to this rush; its effect is a feeling of unstoppability. Once the first line is read, it’s as though something heavy’s been dropped down a chute.

As in Clark’s poem, Babel makes an appearance. “Guerilla Theory” deals in naming and how to name an identity, how to shape an identity when names have been stripped by “letters … dropped / out of bombers”, and maybe what remains of a person who has lost part of himself.

“… I saw
a monkey’s face when I looked
at a cloud, but my mother couldn’t
even make out the head. Someone
looked at a tree and called it a tree.
Someone else looked at a tree
and called it whatever the word
for tree is in Vietnamese,
which I don’t remember anymore.
And the word for that loss
is too big to fit into a single
word.”

Colonialism kills the ability to name, steals language, makes for a speaker “full / of holes and dormant landmines.” And despite the violence, despite the quicksilver movement of the mind at work in this poem, the quiet is what most moves me. It feels right that in a poem about absence quiet works so well; the ending the kind that makes me pay attention in the way a friend who doesn’t often interject catches my attention when he mumbles something; what sticks to the speaker at the end of this poem has stuck with me. I guess I’m Lavar Burton-ing you: Read it.

“The Moon and the Yew Tree” by Sylvia Plath.

This month I was able to spend a day at the Lilly Library at Indiana University where some of Plath’s manuscripts and artwork are archived. (More on this later.) One thing I especially enjoyed and made me think “Drats!” was that the stunner at the opening of this poem was always there and always the opener, at least in the drafts at Lilly: “This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary.”

Though favorites change, this has often been my favorite of her poems.

Originally written in a huge monolith of a stanza, she drew brackets to create separate stanzas on the first draft (or maybe lacking paper she did this as she went). She reworked the final stanza the most; lots of abstraction (and Socrates) fell away. Eventually she cut a penultimate stanza. What I wrote in my notebook while there: “It seems she (like me & [I] imagine many others) best revises in a fury—not gradually over time, but more like triage.”

October 27th is her birthday. She would have been 85 this year. This month also saw the release of Volume 1 of her collected letters. I think of her as one of the best Scorpios, best being best of its kind: physical, sensual, sharp (as in smart and as in all elbows, unsparing), grudge-holding, and talented. I’m in the midst of an essay about her and Flannery O’Connor, so I’ll spare you my love letter for Plath and leave you instead with a Plath fact: she loved avocados and red lipstick.

“The Country of Marriage (Part V)” by Wendell Berry.

Yes, more Wendell Berry. This poem is the title poem of a most beautiful chapbook that I advise purchasing posthaste, unless I know you and you’re planning on getting married in the near future because then you will have spoiled my wedding gift to you.

I’ve just reprinted my favorite section (Part V) here:

V.

Our bond is no little economy based on the exchange
of my love and work for yours, so much for so much
of an expendable fund. We don’t know what its limits are—
that puts it in the dark. We are more together
than we know, how else could we keep on discovering
we are more together than we thought?
You are the known way leading always to the unknown,
and you are the known place to which the unknown is always
leading me back. More blessed in you than I know,
I possess nothing worthy to give you, nothing
not belittled by my saying that I possess it.
Even an hour of love is a moral predicament, a blessing
a man may be hard up to be worthy of. He can only
accept it, as a plant accepts from all the bounty of the light
enough to live, and then accepts the dark,
passing unencumbered back to the earth, as I
have fallen time and again from the great strength
of my desire, helpless, into your arms.

“We are more together / than we know, how else could we keep on discovering / we are more together than we thought?” Low whistle.

I also highly recommend watching Look & See, about Wendell Berry’s work off the page on Netflix.