Pete II

The second meeting with poet Pete Fairchild. I had given him four poems the night before. When I sat down he asked me questions about when I wrote poetry and how it fit in with writing novels. He asked me when I started. Then he said the reason he was asking those questions because the poems were really pretty good. He said they weren't very much like what was out there right now, that the only poet they reminded him of was Kay Ryan, who just became poet laureate. People don't refer very often to classical mythology these days, he said, and an editor might think it was kind of 19th century. He said he and a friend had gotten advance at the same time: Pete for his poetry book, his friend James for a memoir. James's advance was $48,000 more. So he said his advice was probably to stay a novelist. He said he started out as a fiction writer and sometimes he wished he had stayed with it, but poetry took over. He suggested to send things to the top places, the Paris Review, the New Yorker, Hudson River, because he thinks it's better to start at the top and work your way down. That's the opposite of what Harryette Mullen said, which was to start with small and regional publications and get your name in print. So I don't know. It was amazing to have a poet read my poems when I have been working in the dark for so long.