Dropping Out to Drop In

A Facebook Dialogue with Rebecca Behar

My art is also poetry and short “fiction”. And I am head on confronting this very issue every day of my working life. I turned my back on academia where you can get paid to regurgitate curriculum while you do your real work.

Why?
Because ultimately academia is a crutch that consumes your mind and soul after a while if you’re trying to be an artist. I call academia the artist’s meth. It feels great while you’re smoking it; status, paycheck, the admiration of the young….but ultimately your artist’s teeth fall out, you get uglier from compromise, and the admiration of youth makes you psychotic when you start actually believing it.

So I decided 6 years ago to starve to death.

No, let me tell you the truth.
I determined that the undervaluing of poetry by the mainstream (commercial) was a social malaise, a symptom of a wider social problem compounded by the monetization of popular culture.

I looked at who was actually reading and writing poetry first by hitting the poetry readings circuit. There I found the old clutching at reminiscences and the young clutching at life and strait jackets.

The number of young people 16-26 earnestly writing and writing confessional poetry struck me. Especially young women. They were confessing their angst and being young, about being raped, about being molested, about living in a world weighed down by the gravity of the male gaze. There were also cocky young men, rapping and slamming their hearts away.

So I started writing for them.
The same age group that suffers from historic levels of suicide, anxiety and depression, gave me fodder for my writing.
I wrote and read to them in public and my piece Suicide Note gained an audience of lonely girls who would approach me after my reading to highlight how that poem in particular struck them as they didn’t realize that other people felt as they did.

I also began carrying copies of my modestly selling my author copy books with me everywhere I went, signing and selling copies by hand at readings. But also if I met someone new in a cafe or party and the conversation got to the “and what do you do”? part, I’d answer, “let me show you” and pull out a copy of my latest.

“I’m a poet, would you like to hear a poem?”

IOW, regardless of the market, I decided to take my professional seriously and not try and disguise the thrust of what I do. I always have enough author copies of my books within reach so that when someone asks where they can buy one of my books, I list the usual Amazon, Barnes&Nobel, bookshops local to me and then I add “or you can buy a copy from me and I’ll sign it for you”.

At this point, I am ahead of the market because I have numerous direct contacts with my buyers. I talk to them. I find out who they are and why they read and what they need from an author.

Laborious, yes. Low yielding revenue, yes. Time consuming, yes. But I would match my market research on my audience against any data crunching publisher, any day of the week.

I am determined to make poetry pay.
Not a lot, but enough to make a bare boned living at.
I stopped buying things.
I stopped trying to be middle class.
I live in a meager apartment.
I collect food stamps and any other government assistance I can talk my way into and I have absolutely no shame. The government is paying me to be a poet, a writer and an educator.

That’s my government subsidized job, in the long standing, centuries old tradition of the patronized arts.

There is never any shame in survival.
How many fast food jobs did Socrates work? Or Ovid or Homer. Did Dante pack groceries at Trader Joe’s in one of his circles of hell?

I teach independent poetry workshops at libraries for non mandatory donations. I lecture on poetry. I do readings and signings. I collaborate with a music producer in Stockholm, Frederic Iriarte who records my readings to mix with his music and publishes them on line as albums for download streaming. Do they make any money? No. Barely enough to justify the effort.

But I am getting paid to write and read poetry, just not very well.
I love my work and the place it puts me mentally and spiritually to labor through, more than the comforts of middle class continuous consumption I have had to leave behind.

I am totally dedicated to improving upon and perfecting my work for the sake of an unseen audience. For the sake of readers I haven’t even met yet.

I am not unemployed, although I collect unemployment.
I write and teach poetry and writing.
That’s my job.

Here I am: http//igorgoldkind.com

Don’t get me wrong, it’s much harder to be an artist than a businessman. But over 6 years, I have built an audience. I have 5,000 FB followers, nearly a thousand subscribers on other media, including my blog.

I now run into people both on and off line who knows someone who bought one of my books. I also get anonymous phone death threats, obscene emails and am persona non grata among my local amateur poetry community.

But these are small prices to pay for being to hold up my head and answer “Poet” when someone asks me what I do for a living.

I like to add “But I’m only in it for the money”.

Rebecca Behar:

“Igor Goldkind You are just describing the life of dropouts who succeeded, why not – my best friend was like this, but she went to Italia. Depends on the place. Also in some countries you cannot do anything directly with a bookshop or a library – the distribution is perfectly controled, no freelance accepted.

But it does not matter, I belong to this underground and we did wonders, and now slam and spoken word are still great. So I agree that it is very difficult to kill poetry – like weed. But just compare with Victor Hugo – not only his poetry paid for a big house in Guernessey, but for his expensive way of life. And anyway he believed that he was a kind of prophet. But there is something else which is what ppl can accept and understand, called “reception” in general. I think that a real poet provocative and misunderstood by definition.

About an audience and ppl reacting, this became quite easy with internet, but again all these video kids are relying on marketing. My concern is that written, hermetic, creative poetry is obviously confidential. PS – I just visited an exhibition on surrealism, this is exactly what is missing : a big bang, a scandal, a movement breaking all this business & technology boredom. I think that it is happening in Iran, with the movement “women, life, freedom”.”

Rebecca Behar, look at the life and lifestyle of Stephan Mallarme, at a time in Paris where Poets were rock stars. He didn’t compromise his art for the sake of his acquired wealth and fame. The Roll of the Dice, his last work was perhaps his greatest masterpiece inspiring CharlesOlsen and the Black Mountain Poets, as well as my first book, Is She Available?

Rimbaud was a great poet too, but died poor in Africa. And Charles Baudelaire lived off of his mother’s money his entire life. This didn’t qualify his genius nor the fact that he gave world our Edgar Allen Poe; who without Baudelaire’s promotion would have been buried in obscurity.

The general point being is that financial reward and market value has very little to do with art and nothing to do with talent.

It’s funny that you would refer to my naked confessional as “Dropping Out”. I worked decades at corporates, in publishing in academia as a professor at the University of Liverpool. I always earned good money for marketing and publishing other people’s work. (Ever heard of the “Graphic Novel”? I coined the term in the mid 1980s and made publishers billions!)

And earned steady income teaching students how to be artists.

But I never had the balls to walk the line myself and it does take balls (or the equivalent female genitalia). And I was never completely happy with my life, having had wanted to write for a living since I was a child.

Now some 45 years later, I get to do this.
And I’m the happiest I’ve ever been. Because now regardless of my food stamps, I know that every working hour I live is dedicated to my authentic being, to the truth of my experience.

(I also live 4 blocks from the beach and go there a lot to swim and stare at the horizon).

So no, I haven’t dropped out; I was a drop out, I’ve dropped in.
I’ve dropped out of the ‘real world’ of stable salary, constant consumption, obeying the dictates of fools and being happy chattel for human crushing machine Ginsberg named the demon Mollock, in Howl.

And I’ve dropped into the actual world, behind the real world, where poetry and art connect me intimately with 10,000 years of my compatriots from all over the world.

I’ve dropped into the world where me and Rumi can share a bottle of wine while watching the sunset.

You can call me a drop out if you want; but in my experience, I had to drop out to drop in.

I would like your permission to republish this dialogue on my blog. Igorgoldkind.com