Important in Common

A poet friend heading out to a performance by a local band (an all-female Led Zeppelin cover band, if you must know) suggested I come along. I deferred for now, but this got me to thinking about what we do and what we have to show for it.

I suppose, if you write, and you continue to write, you have yourself to show as a writer for what you do, having written. I would say about 90% of what there is to show for being a writer is held in common to all who write: they, themselves, as writers, and the work they have produced. Add to that friendships with other writers. Add to that the occasional glimmer of recognition in whatever form that all writers can recount for themselves: small, scattered publications, a reading, a friend asking for advice on a cover letter - and I should not forget perhaps the greatest reward, that of reading other's books as one who has written or at least made real efforts in that direction.

We have gone a ways here in describing all writers. It remains to distinguish those who publish books, who are reviewed, who have careers and perhaps teach. All this I would say is something like 5% of what a writer can be. It is a terrifically important 5%, no doubt, and critical no doubt for the writers who experience these forms of the writerly life - and certainly all writers are grateful for the success of a few given the nature of the writing itself. This is important to keep in mind, that the success of John Ashbery, for example, is not owning to the person of Ashbery, John but to the quality and effect of the work he produced.

All writers have in common the process and effect, the life of writing. Life seen through the lens of one who can write either about it or from it is something different than otherwise; but this is true also of one who can paint or take good photographs. Perhaps too of people who can dunk a basketball. My point though, or the purpose of this small essay, is to point out what all writers share not whether they can dunk a basketball, though I'm sure there are some who can. Writers who experience the 5% that I will call, for lack of a more clever term, success, share also in the 95% I have described as the life in common to all writers. Logically, I may have more in common with John Donne than with Shaquille O'Neill, and although that sentence makes my head spin a bit it is true as far as it goes in acknowledging the writer's practice as recognizing (and not "defining") who one is in relation to the world.

As a young writer I was very taken up with what I would have to show for being a writer. I almost assumed I would conquer worlds. And if I have done so it's news to me. They would have had to be terribly fragile, mysterious worlds, the kind that are frightened into nothingness at the turn of a page. I have made my peace with all that, as writers do, eventually, even if it has to wait for the first drop of earth on an oaken box, but what a nice surprise it was to be asked to see a band by my poet friend, simply because we are both writers and have known each other for years, and are friends, and share some of the same friends, and trust each other the way people do who have something important in common.