If we are going to be writers
—and in America this can be a bad business—
then we have got to stop thinking about the moneymakers
or at least know that they are a very very few of us.
If you are going to take up that mantle then look past
America and remember that when you started writing
it wasn’t to show off yourself, it wasn’t to say look at me,
look at me. You were trying to share something.
You were seeking something.
You hoped everyone else would seek it with you.
Money is good,
some would even say it is necessary,
but you need to stop thinking about that,
you need to stop thinking about your own fame
and what people in America read.
The world is bigger than America
Even if it hasn’t learned that just yet.
People in America…
they don’t need to read anymore,
and because they don’t need it—reading
is like dessert or learning to drink alcohol
to impress your friends.
So you will shake your head and wonder why
the purveyor of the cheaply wrought story is so often read.
Why even your own mother reads something you would
never try to write.
And you will compare yourself to the tomes or to the pamphlet sized books
that slip out of New York with abstruse phrases and clinical
characters about a life with which you can’t identify.
Everyone wants a life with which they
Can’t identify
Everyone wants candy
Or to read what they don’t understand
To sit back in dumb wonder.
But not a writer.
Such fine writings read by your professors.
No, if you are going to write remember
the poets all over the world who never made a dime
or were confined to prisons and had toes and limbs chopped off who
paid for their words in blood whose printing press was Golgotha,
their lives a crucifixion.
Remember the ones sent to the gulag or sent howling into the night to find the underground country who never came back.
Who spoke and all their burning words fell on deaf ears.
Who wept and no matter how hard, still their tears
Did not make hearts cease to be cold as stone
Remember the prophets who screamed over burning cities
and hailed the swarms of locusts as armies of God,
and the odd boy strung up to a fence and killed
who was his own sort of prophet too.
Take up this cup.
This inheritance:
All of it belongs to you.
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