Prose Writers and Poets

For the last three hundred years or so, prose writers have, from time to time, glanced over in the direction of the poets for guidance in certain matters of life and writing. Contemplating the lives of poets, however, is a sobering activity. It often seems as if the poets have extracted pity and terror from their work so that they could have a closer firsthand experience of these emotions in their own lives. A poet's life is rarely one that you would wish upon your children. It's not so much that poets are unable to meet various payrolls; it's more often the case that they've never heard of a payroll. Many of them are pleased to think that the word "salary" is yet another example of esoteric jargon.

I myself am an ex-poet. My friends the poets like me better now that I no longer write poetry. It always got in the way of our friendships, my being a poet, and writing poems. The one thing that can get a poet irritated and upset is the thought of another poet's poems. Now that I do not write poetry, I am better able to watch the spontaneous combustion of poets at a distance. The poets even invite our contemplation of their stormy lives, and perhaps this accounts for their recent production of memoirs. If you didn't read about this stuff in a book, you wouldn't believe it.

Prose writers, however, are no better. Their souls are usually heavy and managerial. Prose writers of fiction are by nature a sullen bunch. The strain of inventing one plausible event after another in a coherent narrative chain tends to show in their faces. As Nietzsche says about Christians, you can tell from their faces that they don't enjoy doing what they do. Fiction writers cluster in the unlit corners of the room, silently observing everybody, including the poets, who are usually having a fine time in the center spotlight, making a spectacle of themselves as they eat the popcorn and drink the beer and gossip about other poets. Usually it's the poets who leave the mess just as it was, the empty bottles and the stains on the carpet and the scrawled phrases they have written down on the backs of pizza delivery boxes -phrases to be used for future poems, no doubt, and it's the prose writers who in the morning usually have to clean all of this up. Poets think that a household mess is picturesque -for them it's the contemporary equivalent of a field of daffodils. The poets start the party and dance the longest, but they don't know how to plug in the audio system, and they have to wait for the prose writers to show them where the on/off switch is. In general, poets do not know where the on/off switch is, anywhere in life. They are usually off unless they are forcibly turned on, and they stay on until they are taken to the emergency room, where they are medicated and turned off again.

Prose writers, by contrast, are unreliable friends: They are always studying you to see if there's anything in your personality or appearance that they can steal for their next narrative. They notice everything about you, and sooner or later they start to editorialize on you, like a color commentator at a sports event. You have a much better chance at friendship with a poet, unless you are a poet yourself. In your bad moments, a poet is always likely to sympathize with your misery, and in your good moments to imagine you as a companion for a night on the town. Most poets don't study character enough to be able to steal it; they have enough trouble understanding what character is.

Of all human occupations, the writing of poetry leaves the most time for concentrated leisure activities. Poets have considerable quantities of time and a low boredom threshold, which makes them fun and scary to be around. With poets, you are likely to find yourself, as I once did, driving around town at 2 A.M. looking for a restaurant that sells roast beef sandwiches; the sandwiches, in this case, were not for the poet but for his hunting dogs, who had become accustomed to this diet. Loyalty is a religion for poets, and in any case they need the requirements of friendship to fill the other twenty-three and a half hours of the day. They are distractible, however, since they are usually thinking about an image or a favorite phrase or a new approach to the sacred. Prose writers have to spend hours and hours in chairs, facing paper, adding one brick to another brick, piling on the great heap of their endless observations, going through the addled inventory of all the items they've laboriously paid attention to, and it makes them surly-all this dawn-until-dusk sitting for the sake of substantial books that you could prop open a door with, big novels with sentences that have to go to the far right-hand margin of the page. Fiction writers get resentful, watching poets calling it quits at 9:30 A.M. Writing prose is steady work, but it tends to make prose writers grumpy and money grubbing and longfaced. They feel that they should be rewarded for what they do: observing everything and everybody with that wide-eyed staring look, like a starving cat painted on a velvet canvas.

Poets are the nobility of the writing world. Their nobility has to do with their spiritual intelligence and mindhaunted love for language and their subtle perfectionism. Poets can trace their lineage back to Orpheus, but prose writers can't go much further than that money grubber, Samuel Richardson, or that jailbird, Cervantes. Like it or not, prose fiction writers have always been part of the middle class; like other members of the middle class, they perk up when the subject turns to money. You can be a prose writer without having any kind of primary relation to the gods, but poets are often god-touched, when they are not being butchered by the gods, and this fate affects them in curious ways. They think about fate often if not obsessively. Like other nobles who spend their days scouting the heavens, however, poets have little understanding of most worldly occupations, except for writing poems and falling in love and having great sex, which is why half of their poems are about writing poems or falling in love and having great sex.

It's a good thing for prose writers that poets generally gave up telling stories in poems around the turn of the century. Each one of the English Romantic poets, with the possible exception of Shelley, was a great storyteller, and even Shelley wanted to write, with The Cenci, a play that could be produced on the stage; Coleridge's Ancient Mariner has a great story to tell and Keats's story of Lamia has a startlingly nightmarish quality. The story of Don Juan will keep you stimulated and alert, and even Tennyson could tell a story, although there is a softening in Tennyson that gives his narratives a gauzy mix of the medieval and the romantic that we now associate with the paintings of Maxfield Parrish. Despite their great achievements, Pound, Eliot, and Stevens and many other Modernists and Postmodernists did not care to get themselves involved with extended narratives of any kind. They saw, or thought they saw, that progressive narrative was itself a fiction and led to a progressivist view of history in which they did not believe. All their stories have turned into little shards of broken glass, each shard an enclosed historical moment, and part of the experience of reading their poems involves spending hours gluing these pieces of glass together. It is interesting to me that poets have mostly renounced telling stories in their poems, but as an ex-poet I am pleased that they have done so, because it gives me a mission in life.

from Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction by Charles Baxter