good company

He scanned the litmag’s contents page to make certain he was in good company, and then closed the litmag and filed it away for his archives.

artist impoverished

[Paul Léautaud] was mean, slanderous, and cruel; he could also display generosity and great delicacy in his judgments. Even at his most caustic there was a simplicity, an absence of vanity, rare in a writer. He talked about death and love, authors and actors, Paris and poetry, without rambling, without moralizing, without a trace of bitterness for having fallen on hard times. He was sustained, without knowing it, by the French refusal to accept poverty as a sign of failure in an artist. Léautaud, at rock bottom, still had his credentials. His monumental diary "Journal Littéraire", which he kept for over 50 years, can without exaggeration be described as the greatest study of character ever written.

—Mavis Gallant, Paris Notebooks (Stoddart, 1988), 143.

the stacks

They say it’s the age of the end of the book. Yet, at major libraries, you have to show your bona fides, then fill out a form and wait for someone to retrieve that book you wanted from the stacks.

application checklist

I see you have three blurbs on the back of your book, just like the three letters of recommendation you needed to get into graduate school.

global airspace of poetry

Today I believe that with these eight indigent lines I had gained access to a hoary secret society. Without seeking official permission and empty-handed, I had entered an invisible institution, the global airspace of poetry—it was that simple. Besides, who could those permission-granting officials possibly have been? There was no more Parnassus, nor, far and wide, a brotherhood or bohème. I heard of a poetry scene for the first time when I enrolled at Humboldt University in Berlin. That Prenzlauer Berg with its run-down buildings would later become my very own Montparnasse, my drab Salon des Indépendants, populated by similarly idealistic stragglers as I, was unplanned. The muses, I soon realized, while taking course at the local adult education center, were nothing but a worn-out Greek allegory. The line had long been disconnected; you might as well try reading your poems to the ladies at the municipal registry, or the tellers at the post office. No, no, there was no formal accreditation process. You had to begin from scratch, cut off from both the classical and the modern traditions, in the vacuum of a society that tolerated literature only as mouthpiece for ideology. Even if you couldn’t see yourself that way: You were the young barbarian who undertook to carry the burden of a discarded culture on his frail shoulders in defiance of all evolutionary logic.

—Durs Grünbein, The Vocation of Poetry (Upper West Side Philosophers, Inc., 2010)

all titled poets

All poets have MFAs…now what?