Is Poetry a Whore?

The truth is that literature is not a bouquet of flowers, nor is it a prize. The so-called literary life is a disaster. Roberto Bolaño notoriously remarked that “poetry is a whore.” (“La poesia es una puta.”) Then again, maybe he didn't. Aside from the curious personification employed, there is nevertheless a point here, particularly if we take poetry to be shorthand for literature. The prizes, financial and otherwise, that await the successful writer are not innocently acquired. Most writers are failures—I am tempted to say, “all writers.” David Foster Wallace was a highly successful novelist, but he failed at life, as least in his own estimation, tragic and untrue as that may seem to the rest of us. The writer who fails to get his manuscript published fails at both writing and at life.

As someone who has written for a living for many years and is attempting to get a novel published, I would say the possibilities are slim or nonexistent.

Publishers and agents are not intellectuals. Nor are most book publishers particularly good at business, at least not in the sense that their operations are overwhelming profitable. Publishing companies function as minor subdivisions of large media conglomerates. They exist to bring out the film edition of a paperback. Those of us who read because we love books are an eccentric minority, viewed with suspicion. Writers are beneath contempt, existing at the lowest level of the food chain.

What I really want to know is this: who was it who decided that the writer gets a 10% to 15% royalty on the price of a hardcover book, while the publisher gets approximately 40% and the bookstore another 40%?

Now, I can picture the interested parties sitting around a table—publisher and editor, representative of a large bookstore chain, maybe even an agent. Everyone except a writer, who couldn’t make it that day. Or maybe the writer just couldn’t find his voice. What I can’t imagine is any writer willingly saying, “Right guys, we writers want the smallest piece of the pie.”

To state the stunningly obvious, without writers, there are no books. And if anyone thinks publishers are indispensable, think again. Publishers as we know them only came into existence in the early nineteenth century. Before that, there were printers and booksellers, who were often the same person in eighteenth century London.

Back in the Spring, I attended a panel discussion at NYU, “Is there a Future for the Literary Novel?” The panel consisted of several editors, a writer, and a learned professor. The problem was, no one could offer a convincing definition of what a literary novel was. At least Jonathan Galassi of Farrar Straus attempted one: his formulation was that a literary novel was one that a writer would write no matter what (ie, whether he or she was published.) This made sense, until I thought about it a little more. I know several writers of crime fiction and of science fiction who write novel after novel without being published. They don’t write “because they enjoy it,” and clearly they don't write for financial gain. They too write because they have to. Thus, Galassi’s definition is a purely psychological one and does nothing to define the literary novel stylistically or to separate it from other genres of fiction.

I will attempt my definition of literary fiction in a future posting. In the meantime, I would suggest that literature and publishing are diametrically opposed, that book publishing is the enemy of literature, and that literary fiction is the neglected stepchild of the book trade.

Were I giving advice to someone starting out in life, I would tell them to never, ever become a writer. Heroin addicts, transvestites, and whores receive more respect.

And so it seems, poetry is a whore only on a good day, when there are buyers.