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ents, since you can always point to some incident that "proves" you're
no good. In the literary life, which is full of rejected manuscripts, lost
awards and prizes, and critical judgments of your work, it's essential
to develop some self-appreciation to delight in your successes,
wherever and however they arrive. If your workshop praises a poem,
don't think everyone is too nice to tell you how terrible it really is. (If
it is that kind of workshop, you should get out of it as soon as possi-
ble honest feedback is the sign that people respect your writing and
take it seriously.) If a journal publishes your work, don't assume the
editors have bad taste. If you win an honorable mention in a contest,
realize that your poetry stood out as worthier than that of many oth-
ers; don't obsess over not winning first or second prize. Poetry, ulti-
mately, is not a competition, in spite of the competitive nature of
achieving publication and recognition. If you see it as such, you're
likely to feel unhappy, instead of being nourished by it.
Another point is worth mentioning here: You are not your poetry.
Your self-esteem shouldn't depend on whether you publish, or
whether some editor or writer you admire thinks you're any good. If
you write a poem about something that happened to you, and a crit-
ic trashes the poem, don't take it personally. We've seen this over and
over: people equate their self-worth with their poetry. They're
crushed by rejection, by criticism. They wonder what's wrong with
them, why they're no good. Or they blame a teacher, an editor, a fel-
low student, and they stew with resentment. The truth is that good
poems come from a combination of things: awareness, talent, persis-
Self-Doubt 197
tence, persistence, native and acquired language abilities, luck, per-
sistence, knowledge, imagination, persistence . . . None of these qual-
ities necessarily makes one a good human being, though we'd like to
believe that poets are somehow more noble than other folks. But
poets are people who happen to have a particular relationship to lan-
guage, a strong need and desire to use it in a certain way. Poets, as
people, may be selfish, callous, opportunistic, manipulative, unsta-
ble, irresponsible or the opposite. Who you are contributes to your
poetry in a number of important ways, but you shouldn't identify with
your poems so closely that when they are cut, you're the one that
bleeds.
We know a writer who insists he's no good. He's published several
fine novels and books of short stories, had a couple of television
scripts produced, and has won many awards. There's simply no cor-
relation between how he feels about his work and the luminous fact
of his prose, but there it is. It's painful to see this in someone else,
painful to confront it in yourself. You feel you don't have enough tal-
ent, or that you started too late, or will never have the skill to say what
you want to in the right way. You wonder if you're wasting your time;
you're sitting alone in a room when you could be out living your life.
You think about how no one reads poetry, how no one will care
whether or not another poem comes into the world. You must be a
masochist to even consider writing poems. This book you're reading
was a waste of money; why did you buy it, what the hell made you
think you could write? None of this negativity has a thing to do with
whether you're going to be able to write a poem, unless you let it get
the upper hand and keep you from the blank page. If you want to
write poems, you have to acknowledge that that's what you want to
do, and quit sabotaging yourself. Don't give in to doubt; feel it, rec-
ognize it, and then quit beating yourself up and get to work.
Here's an exercise we sometimes give to our students: Sit down and
let that nagging, negative voice have its say. Catalog your faults, your
limitations, all the reasons you can't write, every inner and outer
obstacle you can think of; convince yourself, on paper, that you will
never be a writer.
Now give yourself a chance to answer that voice. Tell it why you
198 THE POET'S COMPANION
want to write, and what you intend to write about; tell it how won-
derfully creative you are, and believe it. Find that positive place
inside of you that is at the heart of your desire to write. What is that
place all about? Maybe it's the memory of stories your parents read to
you as a kid, their magical quality. Maybe it's the pleasure you get
from reading poems that resonate with your own life, that articulate
things you've felt or experienced, or simply dazzle you with the sen-
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