What is this business about paying for "suns"? Do we really need to
pay to promote ourselves, our poems, our treasures? Isn't this come-
on a form of self-prostitution? Are we pimps or poets? Did William
Blake buy ads in the newspapers of his time to promote himself? No,
he did not. He simply wrote the poems that came to him, and then
illustrated them. That it took 200 years for the rest of the world to
discover him and his work was no matter to him. Throughout his life,
he remained true to himself, a goal for eveyone who writes poetry.
And Emily Dickinson, she spent virtually everday of her adult life alone
in her bedroom writing some 1,800 poems in Amherst, Massachusetts.
Yet the poems she wrote came to her through the infinite universe.
Did she hire a P.R. firm to promote her work? Did she pay to have
more and more "suns" shine on her poems that were already brilliant?
No, she did not. And it was not until the 1950's that an academician
got hold of the original versions of her unique and transformative
poems and had them published. Perhaps unwittingly, perhaps on
purpose, if any of us poets become complaisant to the "pay and play"
of the world of poetry, we vitiate the worth of our work, and lose
the heart and soul not only of our poems, but also the import of
our very beings.

Copyright 2020 Tod Howard Hawks