A Poet's Fame (part 2)

As unnecessary as it may be, respect is a fickle thing, hard to gain, and it comes in varying doses. When it comes to the arts as a whole, writing is somewhere in the middle in terms of the likelihood of making good money and enjoying success. It's easier to make a living as a writer than say an ice sculptor, but the billions of dollars aren't being tossed around as they are in the movie, TV, and music industries. On occasion they can be for the rare writer that manages to balance the art of his talent, material, and marketability, but this is hard to come by. The person that does make a good living through words often does so by writing for various mediums, telling their stories in any way they can. With the exception of one writer in particular, the profession as a whole can offer many opportunities for those who are lucky enough to get their name out there. This lonely exception, in a profession surrounded by solitude, rarely tastes success and recognition, at least while they're still alive.

The poet is different. If the artist is an odd job than the poet may be so far gone as to be unexplainable. Poets are those little kids by themselves in the corner of the world playing with a leaf, or pining away after some unreachable ideal, while the rest of the writers are off in their small teams playing an organized sport. Motivation is different for each writer, especially each poet, but for the latter money doesn't even come into consideration. It can't, there's very little money to be made in poetry, and none of this matters to a true poet.

A true poet is a rare breed indeed. For some of them, fame and that which glitters gold conflicts with who they really are. These poets have little consideration for monetary things, all they have is an urge to capture a moment, object, or feeling into words; perhaps for the comfort of similar thinking people but most assuredly to express something and purge it from one's system. It is a blockage that needs to be broken through and a virus that needs to be cured before it overpowers the sensitivity of it's victim.

The strength of the poem lies in its words, of course. They can rhyme and have a lyrical nature to them like a silent melody, a tune that lies within the ear of the reader. They can be perfect in their blunt and simple stated commentary, or enlightening in reaching a surreal and higher form of art. As long as the words steal the essence of the subject, the magic of the topic, in a way that can become synonymous with the feeling or moment in the brain, then all of the poet's struggles will not have been for naught. Some reader out in the stratosphere will understand and connect and learn and evolve. Those readers aren't easy to get either. To gain a certain level of notoriety there usually needs to be a large body of work to blitzkrieg the shrinking potential readership and bring them into the poet's world. It's the rare soul that can create a small limited number of works and expect to ride high with them on the waves of history. Unfortunately, the fact is that many poets do not gain their hopeful receivers until after their death, not always of course but it does seem to be a final joke on them in a cosmic jester sense of the word.

So a big question remains; why does the poet do it? Why do they write, secretly desiring a modicum of fame, when in the field of poetry the brass ring is such a fickle, fragile, and far away thing that it may as well be nonexistent? To this I can only guess. I think they have to. On some level the poet has to reach out, even if that means only reaching other poets, those few and far between ears in the sea of humanity. Because that's what it's all about, expressing and communicating directly to a like minded soul in an attempt to form that unspoken connection of mutual appreciation.