One of America’s most successful poets starts a new, big-bucks teaching job at the University of Chicago this week predicting that his latest book of poetry will sell better than all the previous ones — and will still sink like a stone.
The poet is Mark Strand, a former U.S. poet laureate.
The book is his ninth collection of poetry.
Strand is talking about his book, “Blizzard of One” and about how he’s looking for sales to soar — by as much as several hundred additional copies — thanks to the fact that he can add the words “poet laureate” to the dust jacket.
And then, Oprah comes up.
“Small-time stuff,” he says of the anticipated sales spike when his new book come out in June. “It’s not like being chosen by Oprah. Now, that’s big time.”
But why not? Oprah lives in Chicago. She reads the Chicago papers. Once she learns that Mark Strand is in town, she’ll turn to one of her trusted aides who isn’t off on his/her own book tour and say, “Get him! Poetry is the core of our very existence, the key to our soul,” or words to that effect.
Not going to happen, says Strand.
“When you say to someone, `I’m a poet,’ sure as shooting that person is going to start looking over their shoulder” — for somebody else to talk to.
“People are embarrassed by poetry,” he says. “It reminds them of the poem stuck behind the socks that they wrote when they were 14. It reveals too much of themselves.”
But, let’s get back to Oprah. What if she did pick your book of poetry for her book club?
“Wouldn’t that be something,” says Strand, 63, who figures that right now he makes a few thousand dollars a year — max — off of writing poems. Even though by poets’ standards he is a raging success, “I don’t make anything from writing,” he says.
His MacArthur Foundation genius grant (1987) and that poet laureate title (1990) might look good on the old resume, but they haven’t had to hire extra security at Crown Books to keep the crowds orderly as they clamor for Strand’s latest.
And it is the subject of money that weighs heavily on the artist, who switched from a not-shabby, $80,000-a-year teaching job at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore to the University of Chicago when the school came through with a delectable $146,000-a-year offer, plus perks.
“I can be bought,” he told the Baltimore Sun when a reporter asked about his move to the Midway.
He said he was kidding. (Though he also went on to tell the reporter that the offer from the U. of C. includes full college tuition for his son, Tom, now 14, and an enviable ’round-the-world-size travel budget).
He was definitely not kidding, however, when he told the same reporter that he thought Hopkins was an unfriendly place, and the undeniably obvious, “Chicago has better restaurants and nightlife.”
This created quite a stir in Baltimore, a city that has a pretty big inferiority complex anyhow.
But, back to Oprah.
He thinks out loud.
“Why would she have an aging white male poet . . . ?
“It would be the coolest thing in the world . . .
“I don’t think it’s in the cards . . .
“Wouldn’t that be something . . .
“What a funny idea . . .”
Strand starts thinking about sitting on the set of a TV show that could launch his little book (Alfred Knopf, June 1) into the stratosphere. Strand begins to believe that the book might be Oprah-worthy after all.
“I don’t think there is anything obscure or difficult about the poems in the new book. The language is simple. That doesn’t mean people won’t be made uneasy by the very fact that they are poems, even if they are accessible. . . .”
Then, “It’s very readable. A piece of cake.”
And then, “It’s a tough sell. It is an impossible sell. And you’ll never get Oprah to buy it.”
But, what if? What would he tell the millions who adore her and buy the books she recommends? “It would certainly make a poet’s life.”
In his case, he says, “Ten out of 10 million will buy the book.”
For Strand, it seems, the cup is not always half-full.
Anyhow, he says, it would be wonderful to go on the show and pitch poetry and explain why it is important.
“People find the need for poetry when they have no way of articulating what they feel. Those occasions usually occur when someone dies or someone is born. When the grief is so great. When the joy is overwhelming.
“The key element is people don’t have time to read and reread something. It could be an important part of their lives, because poetry does formalize what is chaotic within us. It shapes feeling over which we have too little control.”
To get started, to dip in gently to the world of poetry, he would recommend that Oprah’s viewers go to a bookstore, flip through a poetry anthology, “and sort of graze around” until they “see a line or a few words that interest you. Then, read it and reread it and see what happens.”
“You’ve got to give it time. Poetry is rather abstract. You don’t read it for plot or character the way you read a novel. You don’t pick up Robert Frost to pick up the latest news of the world.
“I think it’s absolutely necessary that they make time, otherwise they’ll live from sound bite to sound bite or headline to headline.
“This is not a way to conduct a meaningful life. . . . You don’t know anything and you wake up at 70 and discover you never really engaged with life.”
Or, as Strand writes in the new book, in a poem titled “The Next Time”:
Life should be more
Than the body’s weight working itself from room to room.
On that cheery note, Strand is packing up his stuff, room to room, for the move to Chicago. He has found Midwesterners to be stunningly nice. Even if we don’t care much for poetry.
