A friend who is a scholar has pointed out that the ideas sketched out in The Gift are very much in keeping with the anti-consumerist counterculture of the 1970s, and therefore come tinged with a sentimentality whose shelf-life has expired. Poets now occupy the middle class, by dint of the increased presence of creative writing in academia; yet while this explosion of interest has occurred, poems have continued to go extinct from general-interest magazines like Rolling Stone. My brain sometimes is hobbled, not so much by the depreciation of a poem’s dollar worth as poetry’s wholesale dismissal from the assembly of art worth attending to, and I have to talk myself into the idea that there is a value, a pseudo-monetary value, attached to the poem. Or that no-value is still a value, an anti-value that suits the anti-barter.
Native American cultures do provide useful metaphors to describe poetry’s circulation, especially when it comes to the differences between trade within the tribe and trade with outsiders. Within the tribe, what is traded must belong to the realm of gift; commerce is restricted to strangers. Among poets, monetary transactions often come off as tacky when they’re made with other poets. The most memorable example I can think of is contained in Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, the record of a correspondence he maintained for several years with a (slightly) younger man named Kappus. In his third letter, in response to what has apparently been a request for books, Rilke writes:
Finally, as to my books, I would like to send you all that might give you pleasure. But I am very poor, and my books, once they have appeared, no longer belong to me. I cannot buy them myself — and, as I would so often like, give them to those who would be kind to them. So I am writing you on a slip the titles (and publishers) of my most recent books (the latest, in all I believe I have published some 12 or 13) and must leave it to you, dear sir, to order some of them when occasion offers. I like to think of my books as in your possession.
This passage has always stuck with me because it is so obviously wrought from connivance. Rilke professes generous intentions and then flatters the sensitivity with which Kappus would hypothetically receive the books, all of this a buildup to the sales pitch and the come-on of “dear sir” before Rilke seals the deal with the confident assumption that Kappus will rush out and buy. We do not like to see our literary heroes in such a sniveling light.
This explains why it’s extremely uncomfortable, for example, to maintain one’s own cash box at a poetry reading where books are being sold — the poet makes someone else do it so that he or she will not be soiled by money. In actual practice, poets have always marketed themselves: in America, Walt Whitman set the template for unabashed self-promotion by almost singlehandedly producing his books, taking charge of all aspects of their dissemination, from printing to advertising to finally mailing orders out, and even reviewing. (His reasoning: “I have merely looked myself over and repeated candidly what I saw. . If you did it for the sake of aggrandizing yourself that would be another thing; but doing it simply for the purpose of getting your own weight and measure is as right done for you by yourself as done for you by another.”)
Lewis Hyde calls “the labor of gratitude” part of the circular passage of a gift and maintains that this “is wholly different from the ‘obligation’ we feel when we accept something we don’t really want. . Giving a return gift is the final act in the labor of gratitude, and it is also, therefore, the true acceptance of the original gift.” But I see two stumbling blocks in front of this theory about how poetry circulates: first, what if the return gift violates the terms of the ritual in some way? A recent pointed example was Amiri Baraka’s creating, in return for the state of New Jersey’s mantle of poet laureate, a poem called “Somebody Blew Up America,” which accused Jews of having foreknowledge of the destruction of New York’s Twin Towers.
The second problem is more significant: what if poetry really is something most people don’t want — what if they’d rather see advertisements for products they might use instead of the poems that civic arts organizations are always trying to foist on them on the city bus? How does this lack of interest transform the gift? Presumably, the Northwest tribes savored the food exchanged at their feasts. But what if you brought a bowl of silkworm larvae to a modern-day potluck supper — nutritious food that is even considered a delicacy in some parts of the world? I bet you would have a hard time getting people to eat the larvae. Or if they did, it would only be because eating them would prove their macho fearlessness.
When my book of poems went out of print, I bought half the copies that were to be destroyed — seven hundred — for a dollar and nineteen cents each. I’d read about other writers doing this, a truck arriving with pallets that required a fork-lift, but when the shipping line’s semi finally pulled up in the alley and the driver hoisted up the roll-door of the trailer, my heart deflated a bit when I saw only a stack of cardboard boxes, half the size of a refrigerator, strapped in the rear of the empty truck. The boxes looked sad in their grimy cavern, like a dwarf wearing a grown man’s shabby tuxedo. Where could he be going, dressed like that?
Answer: to my storage locker, a warren of rooms made from plywood behind the bus station downtown. Not having any windows, the place was pitch-black when the lights weren’t ticking around their timers for a maximum of fifteen minutes, after which the lights clicked off again to leave me stranded in the dark. Without delay, I made a stab at selling some books. I took a few over to Barnes & Noble, where the clerk summoned a manager who said they could only sell books that were provided by their corporate headquarters in a city far away.
But I live here, I said. I’m local.
Sorry, they said, you don’t have a vendor number. Anything we sell has to have a number. Then I said, Well then perhaps you would be interested in these candles. The velvet is dusty but they are brightly colored underneath.
The local used bookstore took a few, however, and even treated me kindly enough to pull me from my dejection flashback. But I knew it would take at least a century for seven hundred copies of my book to dribble from that store. So I took out an ad in a review where some of my poems were going to appear, a friend having sketched it up on her computer.
It was a small ad that cost eighty bucks, but when the review dropped through my mail slot a few weeks later I was stunned to see it enlarged to fill half a page. We had extra space, the editors said after I wrote to them in panic, so we gave it to you. That’s how I learned one more thing about the taint of poetic commerce — the humiliation attached to it increases in direct proportion to the amount of space utilized for its purposes. A billboard might be a suitable place to sell a movie, but to sell a book of poetry it is unthinkable. Something about the proportion — little book, big ad — is painful.
This pain comes, I think, from the violation of the rules surrounding the circulation of gifts: the poet is supposed to say modestly to other members of the tribe, Oh here, just take it. Friends had stopped by when the books first arrived, and I’d told them that since I wanted to be rid of the books I was going to sell them for the postage cost. “Don’t do that,” they advised, “people do not value something if it costs them nothing.” So they cooked up a price they thought appropriate. And it was thrilling, I must admit, when checks started appearing in my post office box, even though the thrill came tinged with shame.