what it is like

This book of mine arrived fifteen days ago. A beautiful Friday morning. House to myself. Floors to be swept. I set out for an orchard, thinking I'd buy a doughnut and some cider, maybe pick my own and take fartsy photos of apples.

The apples were overpriced, the pick-your-own section was closed, and I was not hungry for doughnuts. I sighed. I went to Meijer. I bought a tiny flat iron and kale.

At home, the mailbox was filled with Friday mail: Red Plum coupons. I dragged the kale into the house. I crumpled up the coupons and cursed my neighbors for filing the foyer with leaves. Had I not looked down at the leaves, I would have missed the small pink slip. I had a package, held for delivery. The sender was Spire Press.

I glanced out the front door, saw the mail truck packed halfway down the block, dropped my kale, and ran. I didn't make it.

I came inside and thought. The package would be available for pickup at eight the next morning, which meant that the package would be dropped off that evening, after the daily round. On Fridays, the post office is open until seven.

I told myself not to get my hopes up, and then I counted down the minutes until six-thirty, and then I got in the car and went down to the post office.

The woman there looked at my pink slip and said, Oh, this won't be in until tomorrow and I said, I know, I was just hoping that maybe, somehow, I could get it a day early and she said, Well, let me check and when she came back from the storeroom she was holding a small box in her hand.

I took the box to the parking lot, which is right on the Grand River, and I posed very carefully with the box held triumphantly aloft, and I made a joke about dropping the still-unopened box into the river, and then I almost did drop the box, and then I drove home.

At home I opened the box. It was the first twenty-five copies of the book, along with the prize money check, along with a very kind note from my editor that said Congratulations! You have a book.

I felt sort of woozy, and I took the top copy off the stack and said This will be mine (the corner was dog-eared and dinged), and then I closed up the box and pushed it under the dining room table. Then I put the book on  my desk, and posted a few pictures on Facebook, and shut down my computer and shut my office door and didn't look at either for the next two days.

*

On Saturday morning, the next day, I ordered a pair of boots online. They arrived a week later. Then, before I could wear them, I rammed my foot into the Senator's marble fireplace and ripped my toenail almost-but-not-really off, into a hinge, and tonight I sit at my desk and look at the poetry boots I have yet to wear and tell myself it's not a metaphor.

*

Listen, I told each of my classes. I am not good at this sort of thing, so I will tell you this once: my book is now available. I'll be doing some readings in the next few weeks. If you're interested, catch me anytime before or after class. End me talking about the book. 

My afternoon freshmen were ecstatic. They wanted to see the book. They wanted me to tell them the story behind the title and read them one, two, three poems.

They made me feel better. That Monday, I sailed from the classroom.

*

I remembered what the B told me in April 2008, the day I came home from Atlanta and told him the news. We were sitting in the car in the Milwaukee airport parking lot.

Listen, he said. You know that a book doesn't change anything. You are still you. You are a writer, with or without a book. We had spent the fall and winter editing his manuscript, sending it back and forth from Madison to Moorhead.

I looked out the window at the planes taking off and landing. I know, I said. 

*

I thought about this first book interview, given by a poet whose first book I love. I remembered the first weeks of spring at the marketing firm, after I got back from Atlanta, spending my afternoons reading all one hundred and four interviews. I thought I would be at the firm forever, or for a few more years. I remember laughing out loud at this part:

Honestly, the only thing that's really changed is the book has lent a sort of legitimacy to my self-loathing, which was otherwise hazy and unfocused. It really is ridiculous to be googling your own name every day, in quotes, with the word poetry beside it, hoping to pop up in some blog that maybe 15 other people in the world read. 

I only did that for the first six months. Now I'm down to once a week.

I loved that part. I tell myself now to remember that part.

*

At the end of week, the box was still under my dining room table. On that Saturday night, eight days later, we went out for the B's birthday. We sat outside on a warm night under a mural of unicorns and dinosaurs and penguins and I drank PBR pints and three of us there argued about the right way to give an academic job interview. Later we switched to brandy, and we traded socks, and we stayed up far too late.

*

I have been thinking about what I want to tell you, about what it is like. I know that I'm lucky to have this book. I know that somebody reading this is sitting on their first book. I don't mean to be a jackass.

It is like this: you are pregnant, and for all those months you get to tell people that you are having a baby, and everyone is excited for you. And then one day you have the baby and everybody says Congratulations and then they go home to their lives, and you and the baby sit in the dining room and you say, So, you're here, and the baby says, Yup. So now what?

It is not at all like having a baby. I'm being a jackass.

But it is weird, strange, surreal.

*

I had the first official reading last Thursday. I realized the morning of that I would be able to read out of the book. I needed a set list. I made one. I flagged the pages with Post-It notes because I although I know the order I am not used to flipping the pages while I read, and then I got to the venue and realized there was no podium and I would have to hold the book at an awkward angle out in front of me, and my shoes made me way too tall considering I was already up on a giant platform six feet above everyone else, and my voice kept cracking, and I felt like a total asshat.

Before the reading, as I was settling at a table with Liz and making small talk with the bookstore organizer, I looked up to see Darren striding toward me, and my brain misfired all its synapses, and one side said, Oh, look, Darren is here and the other side said DARREN LIVES IN MINNESOTA and the other half said Yes? and the other side said THIS IS NOT MINNESOTA THIS IS MICHIGAN and finally the whole brain started to piece it together and it took every ounce of my being to not shout in a quiet bookstore in this conservative corner of this state HOLY FUCKING SHIT WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING HERE?

And then other people came and filled in, and one of my students and his girlfriend camped out at the bar, and other people and their wives listened to me and every time I looked up I made eye contact with someone who was either an old friend or a new friend or a total stranger who was engaged and listening and not just flipping through a picture book labeled Treehouses: Castles in the Sky.

So if my voice cracked and my right knee wouldn't stop trembling, I think it may be because my brain was still shouting HEY SHITHEAD PEOPLE REALLY CARE ABOUT THIS THING OF YOURS SO MAYBE PULL YOUR HEAD OUT OF YOUR ASS AND BE HAPPY, REALLY HAPPY, ABOUT THIS BOOK.

I am. I think.

I am.

*

During my first months in Michigan, as I ran by the old houses in my neighborhood, I would think about what to write in each book. What to write at readings, and what to say to the people who were kind enough to lend words to the back cover. I spent the most time thinking about what to write in the books that would go to the people who know me best, who I wrote the book for.

I am sure I had many answers, but now I don't remember any of them.

*

This book is old. The poems are old. I wrote them looking out the windows and seeing the same trees: maple out front of Highland, locust out my bedroom window at Highland, elm out the window of the office in Madison.

These poems are ghosts. They make me think of Minnesota. They make me miss our old bar. They make me miss sneaking over to print them off in the TA office during the evening on Saturdays. They make me miss the last spring in Highland, the one where we opened all the windows and made fruit salad and dared each other to drink the last of the case of Blatz and then, one by one, packed up our things and drove off the cities we would leave each other for.

The newest poem in that book was written in November 2007. I know some people send out manuscripts for years, making the rounds, and I want to ask them how they do it, how once the book finally appears they can go back to that past and read its poems.

Every time I open this book, I feel like I've been strapped in a rocket ship, a one-way ticket back to the person I used to be, the one I still miss sometimes.

*

I know people say enjoy it, that you only get one first book. I know that a book matters and does not matter at all. I know. I know.

I am telling you this because it seems important that I tell you this. It seems important that I write down that this is what was it was like.

The first book interviews have been very helpful. But some make me want to curl up, get in the rocket ship and go back and do it all over again. Those writers expound on the necessity of publishing with the right first press and winning the right first contest. I worry about the production values and the fonts and the page numbers and the layout. I worry about the readings and the contacts I don't have and will not make. I worry. I worry.

I know it doesn't matter. Listen, I tell myself. This does not matter.

It matters, and it does not matter.

*

I bribed myself today. I told myself to get to Meijer and buy big envelopes and thank-you notes and start mailing out the copies I need to mail out.

Then I told myself that if I went to Target, I could buy myself some new pants while I was at it.

Then I bought a flannel shirt because it was impossibly soft and because yellow and white are my new favorite color combination.

Then I talked myself out of buying a big bottle of bourbon.

Then I went home, sat at my desk, and signed eight books and wrote eight notecards. I saved my parents for last, and to both of them I wrote: Some of these poems are about dogs, and some are about gin, and some are about family, and none of them are meant to wound. 

Then I sealed up the envelopes.

*

I sold a book to a man who said I really enjoyed that reading. Would you sign this for me?

I sold one to a student, who e-mailed me the next day and wrote:

I wanted to thank you for the opportunity to see your poetry reading. I haven't been to anything like it before and I loved the atmosphere. I've never really liked poetry before your class and I think I'm finding myself to like it. 

and I wrote back

I know. I was the same way about poetry. 

There were copies on Amazon, and now they are out of stock.

I told my brother I'd send him a copy, and he told me that he'd rather buy one from the press.

A colleague asked me to visit her class, and I sent along some poems for the class to read ahead of time, and on the day of the visit I was walking down the hallway toward the classroom and stopped to check my watch because I was early, and as I stood there I became vaguely aware of something familiar, and then I realized that my colleague was reading my poem aloud to the class, and I stood outside the door grinning like an idiot as she pronounced leishmaniasis without stumbling like I always do.




How can I worry, when this is all that matters?