Fame. It’s as irrelevant to good writing as sunny weather. Or
is it the gold ring we’re all reaching for?
I was moved to write about fame because I’ve been listening
during my commute to a collection of poetry on CDs called The
Spoken Arts Treasury. This compendium of the writings and voices of 100
leading poets in the United States was released only 45 years ago, but I was
shocked by how many of the poets who were considered necessary writers in 1969
are unknown today. I don’t mean that I’ve only read a couple of their poems. I
mean that I had never even heard the
names of a good portion of the poets in that collection.
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| The Greek goddess Pheme, source of the word "fame" |
Maybe even more surprising is the fact that a collection
released in 1969 did not include many
of the poets of the U.S.A. whom we now consider to be some of the leading
voices of the mid-twentieth century, such as Gwendolyn Brooks, Allen Ginsberg
(too radical for that time), June Jordan, Adrienne Rich (who had already
published her first Selected Poems in
1967), Anne Sexton, or May Swenson. In just 45 years, we have dramatically
changed our sense of who the important U.S. poets of that time were. Many
writers included in The Spoken Arts
Treasury do continue to find readers: Elizabeth Bishop, e.e. cummings,
Langston Hughes, Robinson Jeffers, Sylvia Plath, William Carlos Williams, etc. But
it seems almost arbitrary which poets were included in this anthology.
The word
“fame” comes from the name of the Roman goddess Fama, which in turn comes from a Greek word that just means “talk.” That in turn, is related to Old Church Slavonic bajati, but you already knew that. Hey, Zack, what is your point?
The point is that fame is just talk, it’s not hard evidence of truth or
quality.
Just because a writer is known today, or unknown today, does
not mean that her or his reputation will remain that way. In fact, it’s almost
a guarantee that tastes and readers will change, and that writers whose work speaks to a
particular time and/or readership will vary in popularity, or maybe find new
readers in a different time or place. We should not be intimidated by a
writer’s reputation and feel we have to like that person’s work. On the other
hand, we should appreciate writers who are not well known, but whose
work we genuinely enjoy. In other words, trust your taste and your reaction to
a work of literature, not the writer’s reputation.
Other recent posts about writing topics:
How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry?
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka
How to Be an American Writer