On Fear

By Alice Allan

“Lunch is for wimps.”—Gordon Gekko

“If you can’t, then it doesn’t matter anyway.”—Faith No More, “Epic”

Elijah Blumov is a dear friend. I regularly send him pictures of my cat. He’s someone I feel I can call when I’m on the verge of tears.

When it comes to poetry, we tend to disagree.

Reading Elijah’s recent essay, The Iron Lyre, I had two competing responses. One was: “Look at my friend, going for broke, arguing for what he believes in. Look at him, being erudite and funny while doing it.” The other response was: “Yeah, nah...”

But if you’ve come here in the hope that I’m about to start some online drama, you can close the tab. I don’t want to pick holes in Elijah’s argument. His argument is well-made, and—as became clearer to me when Elijah and I discussed the essay with another dear friend, Matthew Buckley Smith—it’s a provocation, not a directive. There’s room to disagree. Elijah can advocate for a return to “ambitious, sublime poetry,” and I can continue being exactly the kind of poet I am (disillusioned, skeptical, weighed down by practicalities, stuck with my Aussie suspicion of “tall poppies”), without starting an argument on the internet.

What I do want to offer is a countervailing perspective. I want to write something for poets who don’t hear a call to arms when Elijah rails against “the neurotic, self-obsessed, lily-livered state of contemporary poetry.” Poets who don’t have ideas about what contemporary poetry needs more or less of. Poets who know they must write, but who, when they come to the page, often feel small. Even a little scared.

Perhaps you don’t get scared. It could be that when you open your eyes of a morning, the first sensation you feel is one of expansive possibility. Maybe you already have what Elijah describes—a desire to live your life in a heroic key, and the confidence to attempt that each day.

Or perhaps, you are like me. When you open your eyes of a morning, your first sensation is the same wave of dread that has washed over you for as long as you can remember. For people like us, “heroic key” means getting up, getting dressed, and managing not to cry before breakfast. Maybe it means getting all the way to the supermarket, or even the post office, and managing not to scream when the guy behind the counter berates you for choosing the wrong kind of envelope.

If you are like me, what I want to say to you is this: Fear isn’t a bad place to start.

I’ve come to this conclusion by getting interested in the relationship between fear and certain flavours of misery. No one should be taking mental health tips from me, but on a good day, I can remember to ask myself: “What is the fear behind this anger, this jealousy, this disgust, this obsession?” I’ve found that when I get specific, I have the chance to decide how significant a given fear is, and what, if anything, I can do about it.

I fear the deaths of the people I love. I fear that their love really is as fragile as I imagine it to be, and that my love makes no difference to the quiet battles they have to face. I fear the consequences of the next record-breaking flood, heatwave, storm, and fire. I fear I will leave the stove on, the house will burn to the ground, we will lose everything we own, and it will be my fault. I fear my selfishness will always outweigh any move I make toward becoming a better person. I fear I will never again fit into my black jeans.

And I fear poetry. I fear that I’m no good at all this, that I’m lazy, that no matter how hard I work, I will never make up for the fact of my beginning late, that everything I learn will continue to fall out of my sieve-like brain at exactly the rate I learn it, that whatever I have learned amounts to nothing much. I fear that I am in fact neurotic, self-obsessed, and lily-livered, and so is my poetry.

So what can I do, as a poet filled with fear? I can acknowledge that, in the words of Australian poet laureate Ern Malley: “These things are real.” But also, to quote Bruce Willis in Looper, thumping the table at Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s incessant questions about time travel: “It doesn’t matter!!!”

Now watch me tread carefully as I try to explain, because this is exactly the kind of thinking Elijah’s arguing against—this dismissive attitude toward the work we devote our lives to. (I don’t say “devote our lives” to be romantic. I say it to remind us of time, money, dignity, energy, relationships, and sanity.) It’s true that poets can get high on thoughts of insignificance. When we are fearful, we can find a weird relief in thinking ourselves the least important kind of artist ever to exist in the entirety of human history. In applying Bruce Willis to poetry, I don’t mean that.

The poet who matters most to me is Jane Kenyon. Here’s one of her poems:

          "Colors"

          Sometimes I agreed with you
          to make you stop telling me things. 
          I was a fist closed around a rock. 

          For a long time nothing changed. 
          It was like driving all day through Texas. 

          But now I’ve stopped
          tearing the arm off the waiting-room chair, 
          and sneaking back at night to fix it. 

          And the change was like light
          moving through a prism, red
          turning to yellow, green to blue, 
          and all by insensible degrees.

Kenyon is heroic to me. She wrote in spite of a basically intractable misery that lived in her head all her life. Her poems are about watering the geranium on her porch, walking her dog up a hill, finding a hair between the floorboards of the country house she shared with Donald Hall. No one is going to categorise this woman as an epic poet. I may well live to see her reputation ebb away. To most people on the planet, she doesn’t matter. To me, she will always matter.

In telling you about her, I’ve almost talked myself around to Elijah’s point of view. If I can’t stomach reaching for Homeric/Miltonic/Shakespearean heights, could I at least try to become someone like Kenyon? Which leads me to think: Six books in 21 years, a couple of really famous poems, a collected, a best of. I’m already nearly the age Kenyon was when she died. Is there enough time for me to just try harder? But what difference will that make? I have tried. I am trying. I’m tired of all this trying. And this is where the misery lives. To make it through the rest of the morning, I need to return to a more skeptical, practical point of view. I need Bruce to shut it down.

There’s a simpler way to say this, which is: I don’t write poetry because I think my writing matters now, or will somehow matter later. It might. It probably won’t. It doesn’t matter. I write poetry because I love writing poetry.

Ambition is a drug that might work for others, but the furthest I can safely go with it is wondering whether, as a poet, I might one day amount to something in the same way George Eliot’s Dorothea Brooke amounts to something. Dorothea is an average kind of person, and not without her flaws. She’s naïve, inflexible, annoyingly pious, and kind of a bad hang. She’s also heroic in that, as life strips away her illusions, she continues to find the willingness to act out of love. She is often afraid, and keeps going. She has many opportunities to give up. She ignores them all.

Obviously, I can’t end an anti-epic essay by invoking Middlemarch, so here’s one last thought:

There aren’t many things I fear as much as I fear flying. I live in Melbourne, and Melbourne to JFK is a 21-hour flight if you go via Auckland. I recommended you go via Auckland. It’s way nicer than LAX.

On the day I first met Elijah in person, we went for a long, surreal walk through Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. My whole trip to New York was surreal—full of the rapturous dissonance that comes when relationships go from digital to actual, involving actual bodies that are no longer many time zones away but actually right there. Among my keepsakes is the Google Maps screenshot I sent Elijah to prove I was a 23-minute walk from where he was waiting, at the edge of Grand Army Plaza. When we hugged, he lifted me off the ground.

We wandered through the park, talking mostly about poetry—how we write, who we admire, where we want to get published, how we make a living, how art works. I remember him asking me to explain what it is that moves me when I look at a Rothko. I remember my answer convincing neither of us.

The further we wandered, the more I felt the difference between Elijah’s then 27 years of age and my then 40. I always want to keep talking about poetry, and to appear young and vital, but I am never more powerful than sore feet and low blood sugar. And so, at a certain point, I interrupted our discussion about our writing, our heroes, and how art affects us, to say: “Hey, I really need to eat lunch.”

This is the pattern I know best: Movement toward poetry, interrupted. When I don’t achieve literary immortality, I’m not going to wonder why. I’ll know it was the practical that kept me from the sublime.

Last, last thing: Your idealism isn’t something that can be reinstated once it’s gone. So protect it, poet. And when the fear overtakes you, may you always have a friend you can call.

Alice Allan produced the long-running podcast Poetry Says. She recommends Ep. 215 The collapsing building as a starter episode.