The Art of Living

The most recent Poets & Writers magazine closes on the final page with an essay by Harryette Mullen, an American poet and recent winner of the Jackson Poetry Prize, which carries with it a $50,000 purse. The generous amount will allow the poet to carry on her work without having to worry about keeping body and soul together — as Somerset Maugham was fond of saying — at least for a year or two.

In the essay, she writes of a time long gone, when San Francisco was the center of the American poetry scene and poetry actually mattered. Back when the Beats were as well-known — or nearly so — as the Beatles and words were the currency of intelligent society.

In it, she writes, “Time was more important than money. Life was more important than poetry.”

I’m sitting in a trendy Dallas cafe as I write this, about to meet with fellow business owners in the time-honored ritual of “networking,” nurturing business relationships and friendships, partly because entrepreneurship can be a lonely business, and it’s nice to have fellow travelers in this lonely road with whom to commiserate, but also partly in the hope that the effort might turn into more business further along that lonely road. It’s how it works, and we all understand that.

I recall Ms. Mullen’s lines, though, which have been ringing in my head all night, echoing in my dreams. I wonder, “If time is more important than money, and life is more important than poetry, then who am I — a writer, a business owner, a poet in spirit if not in vocation — in a society there money is considered more important than anything?”

We Americans talk about the importance of family, of love, of friendships. We create films that “lift the human spirit” — to wield an overused phrase in the film criticism industry — and laugh knowingly as we watch or read satire that skewers our obsession with trivia and the emptiness of much of what passes for “culture” in our society.

Yet we talk of nothing but money. Our heroes are hungry entrepreneurs with the eight-figure incomes, titans of industry, filmmakers more well-known for how much they command per picture than what their films actually mean. I’m obsessed with the numbers on my balance sheets. My “books” aren’t the ones that line the cluttered shelves of my home — the Maughams, the Lawrences, the fiction and history and literature and even the occasional romance novel — but rather the thin, all-important sheets of paper my accountant keeps in his office. I measure my worth as a writer based on how much per word I command, how much I can charge a client by the hour to spin more froth about her product or service. In this world, words remain the currency, but in the literal, financial sense.

If time is more important than money, and life is more important than poetry, then who am I? If my time is spent pursuing money and forgetting poetry, then where does my spirit fall in a universe that couldn’t care less?

Photo credit: “tiny book,” by bookgrl on Flickr.

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