Optional Resurrection
The perks of staying dead
Recently, the publisher of my first (non-self-published) poetry collection reached out to me to see if I was interested in re-releasing that book. Written in 2009, Spiking the Sucker Punch was going to be a turning point in my poetic career. I had been told that poets who will professionally “make it” usually have a published collection by the time they’re 30. Regardless of the veracity of that wisdom, with this book I had squeaked in under the wire at almost 29. I was going on performance poetry tours, organizing the largest youth poetry festival in the world at Young Chicago Authors, and curating a live literary variety show called the Encyclopedia Show (RIP) that we were “franchising”1. This book signified to me that I was ready to start forging out on my own as a Professional Artist.
But, all of a sudden, that was 15 years ago.
Despite despising capitalism and the, by design, collateral damage it exerts onto the world, I knew back then that it was the only game in town for having shelter and food. I had, what I believed to be, a healthy understanding of the separation of skillsets between creating art and selling it. Selling is the opposite of art - art should give/lift/embiggen, and hopefully embiggen enough to offset its price tag. The ROI for the audience is soul-based and immeasurable. It’s a cruddy relationship. I knew artists who were bad at business but made wonderful wonders. I knew folks who were good at business and made empty nothingnesses. If the X-axis is art, the Y-axis business, then I could plot everyone I knew on that graph, and hopefully, eventually, myself.
Of course, that imaginary graph is subjective (and judgy af) and does not take into account audiences’ demands and fickle tastes. Nor does it allow for people to be plotted in multiple places depending on the day. Nor does it adjust for privilege. What if you’re a creative genius no one likes? What if you’re, god forbid, happy just making little poems?
So, as it turned out, I was not able to sustain the business side of things to support myself on art alone. This book was also the last full-length poetry collection I published.
In the meantime, I began not only falling in love with the native ecosystems of Illinois, but decided to jump into that professional world and try to pay my bills with conservation dollars (but also heavily subsidized by my partner’s paycheck).
All this to say, I don’t know what to do about ye olde booke. Here are the options as I see them:
Revise the hell out of it. Add an apologetic foreword (“I was young-ish and stupid!”). Remove several poems entirely. Add new ones. Call it a second edition. Create some fanfare around the re-release.
Minimal revisions and create no fanfare but just have it out there, maybe getting $3 in royalties.
Do not re-release it. Mourn my $3.
I have already gone through the whole thing and preliminarily marked it up. New line breaks and capitalizations to reflect my current proclivities. Replacing some factual inaccuracies. Removing whole poems that I no longer want to stand behind. Removing words that are unnecessarily hurtful.
But then where do you stop revising? There are parts where I am clearly trying to sound smart or edgy or both. There are parts where the musicality of the words feels gross. In the thank yous (dear God), I tried to thank as many people as I could but left some out, and included some who I have drifted away from naturally (or who I do not like at all anymore). Several of the folks I’ve thanked passed away.
If I were to write a foreword, would I say something like, “Look, Whitman rewrote Leaves of Grass a million times, so, as the universally agreed upon heir to Whitman, shouldn’t I do the same?” Or, “Just because I have revised this, doesn’t mean I think it’s any GOOD. And you’re wrong if you like it!” Or, “I know that I have grown, but growth shouldn’t imply improvement: I’m just larger, like a mulberry tree growing through and around a chainlink fence and shitting out many more berries all over your driveway every summer.”
When I finish a poem, I used to say to myself, “Maybe the next one will be good.” I don’t say that as much anymore, but I can hear that person in the subtext of all of these poems. He’s me, and a mess. He’s a me-mess!
During lockdown (April 2020), I started my twice-monthly Zoom poetry workshop that’s been going with relative regularity since then. And in that time, it feels like poetry has become fun again, and because the stakes are divorced from rent, I have a completely different relationship with the art form that didn’t exist when I wrote dear little Spiking the Sucker Punch. It feels a little like putting this book back out there is endorsing a kind of person I’ve paid a lot of money in therapy to change.
Have you read anything you wrote 15 years ago? Do you like it? Do you like it enough to ask people to pay you for it?
Not doing anything. That’s what I’m leaning toward.
Maybe the next book will be good!
For free! But we still had the show in like 25 different cities in four different countries.