ten
by John Yamrus
i don’t remember the name of the poem, but Emily Dickinson once wrote “Luck is not chance — it’s Toil”….and, man, was she ever right! in my “position” as a writer, i talk to a lot of students…a lot of kids…a lot of aspiring writers…and they’re all pretty much convinced of one thing…the world is going to beat down their door to applaud and reward their golden, unique, and unbelievable genius.
i grew up around tons of guys like that. guys who spent more time talking about the stuff they were going to write than doing the actual writing. it reached a point where i finally got to understand that their whole point was the talk…they liked the idea of being a writer a whole lot more than doing the actual work.
that was a long time ago when i first ran into people like that, and i still have a great big chip on my shoulder about them…those guys…they were mostly guys back then…i can still picture them, sitting around, listening to Coltrane (who i’ve since come to love — so there’s at least something they got right) and talking…talking…talking. that’s all they seemed to do is talk…and pose and smoke…and talk.
i never looked at writing (poetry in particular) in the same way they did. they sweated over (or said they sweated over) each and every word, like they were making some cold, lifeless thing.
to me, poetry was more haphazard…more alive. it was and is a real and fluid and flexible thing. mistakes and miss-steps are part of the process, and more than a little of the beauty.
poems weren’t something you worked on, hammered at and saved. for me, poems were a suicide note, scribbled in haste, and covered in sweat and blood and tears.
maybe that’s why i don’t save a lot of the things i write…they mean so much and they mean so little. i mean, you don’t take a breadth and hold it…you breathe…you do the deed and you move on to the next one.
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what makes the thing precious is the doing.
just now i took a minute to look up that poem by Dickinson, and it seems the old girl was a woman of few words. in fact, the poem’s only 23 words long…27 if you count the title, which i don’t, because if you know me, and anything about my writing or my poetry, titles are kind of a waste of time, and more often than not talk down to the reader, trying to give a brief description or explanation of the poem, as if the reader isn’t smart enough to figure it out for himself.
anyway, this is what Dickinson wrote:
Luck is not chance —
Luck is not chance —
It’s Toil —
Fortune’s expensive smile
Is earned —
The Father of the Mine
Is that old-fashioned Coin
We spurned —
i don’t think she spent a lot of time, standing around, talking about the what or how or why of the poem. i like to think she just did it. wrote the thing…threw it in a drawer and walked out in the yard to watch her dog take a dump in the grass.
maybe that’s not exactly how it happened…for sure, luck is not chance. but Life is serendipity…you do the deed and you move on.
at least, that’s the way i look at it.
In a career spanning more than 50 years as a working writer, John Yamrus has published 35 books (29 volumes of poetry, 2 novels, 3 volumes of non-fiction and a children’s book). He has also had nearly 3,000 poems published in magazines and anthologies around the world. A book of his SELECTED POEMS was just released in Albania, translated into that language by Fadil Bajraj, who is best known for his translations of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Bukowski, Ginsberg, Pound and others.
A number of Yamrus’s books and poems are taught in college and university courses. His most recent book is SELECTED POEMS: THE DIRECTOR’S CUT (Concrete Mist Press, 542pp).
