DAVID DUCHOVNY AND ELIZABETH GILBERT

Actor David Duchovny recently told someone I admire that poetry is useless but necessary.  

Zzzzzz. Do a Google search.  Like many of his comments, Duchovny is not the first person to use this analogy, a clunky way of saying that he’s so much deeper than other people.  

How quickly celebrities rise in the book publishing industry. 

See, Duchovny’s got a new book of poetry out, and now he sees himself as an expert in this field. Elizabeth Gilbert has done the same thing by manipulating the addiction (recovery?) community. All the other memoir books were lies, apparently. Still, now you have to listen hard to Elizabeth and Oprah, for they both know the best path to sobriety, and Elizabeth has learned her lesson: she’s going to use this book money better than she did before. 

Me? I’m decades sober, and I’m still mourning the closing of a journal that accepted my poem but closed shortly thereafter.  I am not sure Duchovny could ever understand how devastating it was for me.  I won’t send it out again for a lot of reasons he’ll probably never experience, because I don’t think poetry needs to be defended in that way.  

Duchovny will never know what it’s like because his agent will find him a publisher regardless.

He’ll never be asked like a dear friend of mine: “But will you be able to do this?” repeatedly. Code for, Do you have money or someone who will be your benefactor for the book tour? 

I tried hard to yank my attention back from that sticky fly trap Duchovny’s set for me, caught in the rich celebrity publishing world where everything comes way too easily.

I won’t send it out again, submit it to other journals. That’s how much I care about my poem that was lost. But I will mourn the loss of publication.  

Yesterday, before sunset, on our last walk of the day with Sheldon before retiring to homework, paper grading, and reading, we saw a man across the street, sitting on his brownstone stoop, loudly reciting a poem–a work in progress.  He kept repeating sentences and replacing words, struggling to revise them aloud. I didn’t recognize him.  I wasn’t sure if he was well-known.  Maybe he simply loves poetry. I didn’t care.  I cared more about having the grace to experience it. 

By the way, The Confidence Game Why We Fall For It…Every Time by Maria Konnikova is worth a read.