Welcome to the New Hampshire Young Writers Conference, 2005. My name is Jack McCarthy and I'm a writer. It's an honor for me to be here today, and I want to thank Rodger Martin and the entire New Hampshire Writers Committee for making it possible. See, I've never written a best-seller or made a lot of money on a book. Mostly I write poetry, and what success I have had has come by virtue of my reputation in the Poetry Slam community.

There may be some here who have no present interest in writing poetry. When I was a young man, poetry had not yet presented itself to me as a realistic option either. I ask your pardon for the narrowness of my focus. I hope that you can listen to me with an open mind. That's a very good attitude for any kind of writer.

I'm going to begin by reading you the last few stanzas of a slam poem. Not because I'm here to convert you to slam poets, but because I like what this particular poem has to say. It's from a poem called "Help Wanted" by Shane Koyczan, from Vancouver, Canada, who won the Individual championship at the National Poetry Slam in Providence in 2000.

grandma told me young man you can't be concerned with whatever it is they've got the only reason they think they're beautiful is the same reason they think you're not

and young man you have beauty beyond measure you're a treasure entrenched in this earth you can't let strangers determine your worth rise and shine

so I rose and I shone put on my shoes and I was gone

see grandma bought me my first phone she said young man from time to time I too need to smile would you do me a favor and keep me on speed dial

yes grandma…I will and still to this day I can call her up and hear her say it's a game you play you win you play you lose you play

rise and shine the world has a window that holds a sign

there's help wanted out there somewhere but young man if you are playing to win the first thing you have to do is apply within.

THE BEST ADVICE I CAN POSSIBLY GIVE TO A YOUNG WRITER

Write. Write every chance you get. Write letters and send them. Write letters and don't send them. Write for a particular audience. Write for your eyes only. Write for a hypothetical audience that might never exist. Doesn't matter; string words together so you get better at doing it. Don't ever let anything stop you. Don't pre-censor yourself. Don't worry about how good it is. You cannot possibly know how good it's going to be until you've written it. Once you know where it's going, you can go back and fix the parts that don't work.

Robert Hass says, "Take the time to write. You can do your life's work in half an hour a day."

You play, you win; you play, you lose; you play.

THE SECOND BEST ADVICE I CAN POSSIBLY GIVE TO A YOUNG WRITER

Don't give up your day job.

THE THIRD BEST ADVICE I CAN POSSIBLY GIVE TO A YOUNG WRITER

Read. Read newspapers. Subscribe to The New Yorker. If you're interested in poetry, subscribe to Poetry Magazine. Read yourself to sleep every night. Every meal that you eat alone, prop up a book or open a magazine or a newspaper. Always carry a book with you for those unexpected moments in the emergency room. Read until you encounter something that makes you think, "I wish I had written that," and then makes you add, "and I could have." This is called inspiration. Then go out and write.

WHAT KIND OF WRITING MAKES THE MOST MONEY?

Ransom Notes.

As of 1992, my life's work in poetry came to 109 pages in a binder. Then two things happened.

First, my new wife blackmailed me into going to a workshop with Galway Kinnell. Second, to celebrate her seventeenth birthday, I brought my youngest daughter to the open mike at the Cantab Lounge in Cambridge. Annie was a terrific writer, and I thought this might energize her. I was the one who got hooked.

I DIDN'T FIND MY VOICE UNTIL I FOUND MY AUDIENCE.

Audience is what I really want to talk to you about today.

How do you find an audience? "Writer's Market" and "Poet's Market" are two very useful books that are published every year. If your idea of audience is publication in magazines, these books are well worth the price.

And by the way, if you're a poet, you need to be published, if for no other reason than that every time you tell a stranger you're a poet, their automatic response will be, "Oh. Are you published?"

There seems to be a widespread impression that there exists a category of "Poet in Their Own Mind Only." People in general are inclined to lose interest in this category pretty quickly. (Now that I think of it, this impression is not entirely without foundation.) So, poets, when somebody asks, "Oh. Are you published?" it's a good thing to be able to answer smugly, "Yes," even if you have to smile and add, "But only in some little magazines you've probably never heard of." (Always smile when you add that.)

So invest in a copy of "Poet's Market." Pore over it. Find the little magazines that sound as if they might be open to your kind of material. Send off submissions. Keep careful track of what you've sent where. Always include a self-addressed stamped envelope.

Stick to it and you will get published, and you'll be able to pass the Poet-in-Their-Own-Mind-Only screening question. In the mail you'll get one or two copies of a little magazine that it would never occur to you to buy if you saw it on the rack at a big bookstore.

But at some point you might ask yourself, "Is this what I meant when I dreamed of finding an audience?"

Let's talk a little about what I call "The Economics of Audience." Let's suppose you get something published in Long Island Quarterly. How many people will read it? Long Island Quarterly takes three months to respond and has "a press run of 250 for 150 subscribers of which 15 are libraries. 50-75 shelf sales." Those numbers are not untypical of the little magazines you'll find in "Poet's Market." You think, "150 subscribers plus 75 shelf sales; 225 people. That's not a bad start."

But ask yourself this: how many of those 225 will actually read my poem? You can start by counting all the people who make it a point to read the magazine cover-to-cover. What percentage do we suppose that is? for Long Island Quarterly? Let's be generous and say ten percent. That gives us twenty two and a half people. Call it 23.

The other 202 readers are going to pick and choose. Some of them have bought the magazine for a specific reason; maybe they've been published, and they want copies for relatives. How likely are they to read your poem? Let's be generous and say another ten percent, which is 20 more. We're up to 43.

You see where I'm going with this. By the time we finish exploring all the possibilities, you're lucky if you can honestly predict that 50 people will read your poem, and the chances are you'll never know what anyone thought of it.

Here's another idea: read your poem at an open mike. You can reach 50 people very fast. They might tell you what they think the same day.

Here. Here is the story I want to tell you. By 1993, a vibrant open mike scene had grown up around Boston, rooms full of regular people living regular lives, coming out to poetry at night to tell their stories. I was astonished by the number of good poets I was hearing. I thought, "Good poets are very thick upon the ground. I'm going to have a hard time distinguishing myself in this world. But it looks like an awful lot of fun being part of this community."

Today I think the open mike movement is a revolution that will ultimately change the face of American Poetry. But as of 2005, American Poetry is still like a ritzy academic town, say Hanover, New Hampshire. One of those towns where, if you work there, you can't afford to live there. The open mike movement is like a carnival that sets up on the outskirts of town. The town tolerates us, because we're a curiosity, a source of entertainment; we bring in a little business. But the cops keep a close eye on us.

So there I was in 1993, 54 years old, sitting with my daughter Annie at the Cantab Lounge in Cambridge, and the emcee called my name. I got up and read a poem I had written twenty years earlier. When I finished, the crowd applauded and the emcee, Michael Brown, said—unexpectedly, because he hadn't said anything like it before—"That was a really good poem." That was all it took.

The next week Annie was somewhere else, but I was back at the Cantab with another poem, and as I walked out the door that night I was thinking, "They really liked that. Now I have to top it next week." From an average of 4-5 pages a year, I started trying to write a poem a week, for the Cantab. I didn't always pull it off, but enough so I later learned that a sort of legend had grown up about how I came in every single week with a new poem.

I didn't ask myself where this was going to lead, because I was having fun. I had a vague idea that there were certain hoops you had to jump through to be a quote Successful Poet unquote and I knew that at my age, I didn't have time to start at square one. Being a quote Successful Poet unquote was off the table. But I was writing a lot of things that I was very happy with, and I was having a great time. All things considered, that was enough success to keep me going.

It's been about eleven and a half years since that first night at the Cantab. My life's work is now approaching eleven hundred pages.

If you're looking for fame and fortune, don't look at me. Fortune-wise, if I'm honest about my expenses, I have to admit that I'm still not breaking even on my poetry.

Fame-wise, it's a little more interesting. I've learned that there are students around the country performing my work in poetry and forensics contests—did you know that there are competitive poetry teams in high schools in Texas? The students find me on the Internet—an institution by the way, that is going to rewrite every existing rule about publication. So far it has only scratched the surface. That's a lecture in itself.

One of my poems has been picked up and published on websites from here to Jerusalem—literally. My wife Carol recently told me we'd be going to Phoenix in April, and I was able to go online and get three features in three nights. It ain't People Magazine and so far the paparazzi and the super-models have kept their distance, but there are people in Phoenix who know and respect my work.

For that I have to give full credit to the Poetry Slam.

I talked earlier about the Open Mike as a carnival on the outskirts of Hanover. Within that carnival, the Poetry Slam is the side show, where you find all the mutants and the mutants manqué. (But let me here observe parenthetically that EVOLUTION HAPPENS BY MUTATION.)

What is a poetry slam? A poetry slam is a competition in which poets perform their own work, not to exceed three minutes, and are scored from zero to ten by judges chosen randomly from the audience. Most big cities in the country have at least one poetry slam, either weekly or monthly. 63 venues sent teams to last year's National Poetry Slam.

The first time I ever saw a poetry slam, I said, "No way in the world will they ever get me to do that." But it's hard to be a regular at the Cantab without wondering how you'd do if you did get into a slam. The first time I slammed I got knocked out in the first round. The second time I got knocked out in the second. The third time I won.

There followed about a year when I slammed several times and beat everyone I faced except the people who had been to the National Poetry Slam. So in 1996 I tried out for the Boston team and I made it. That year they held Nationals in Portland, Oregon, and Boston was one of the favored teams, having finished first, first, second and third the four preceding years.

An independent film-maker named Paul Devlin had come to Portland to make a documentary about the proceedings. The first night Boston was up against two of the other favorites, Austin and Cleveland, and everybody knew that the winner of that match would probably go on to finals, so Devlin brought his whole crew to film our match. It was the one time in my life I was in the right place at the right time. Here is the poem I did that night.

I was just old enough to be out on the sidewalk by myself, and every day I would come home crying, beaten up by the same little girl.

I was Jackie, the firstborn, the apple of every eye, gratuitous meanness bewildered me, and as soon as she'd hit me, I'd bawl like a baby.

I knew that boys were not supposed to cry, but they weren't supposed to hit girls either, and I was shocked when my father said, "Hit her back."

I thought it sounded like a great idea, but the only thing I remember about that girl today is the look that came over her face after I did hit her back.

She didn't cry; instead her eyes got narrow and I thought, "Jackie, you just made a terrible mistake," and she really beat the crap out of me. It was years before I trusted my father's advice again.

I eventually learned to fight-- enough to protect myself-- from girls-- but the real issue was the crying, and that hasn't gone away.

Oh, I don't cry any more, I don't sob, I don't make noise, I just have hairtrigger tearducts, and always at all the wrong things: Tom Bodett saying, "We'll leave the light on for ya;" I cry at the last scene of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.

In movies I despise the easy manipulation that never even bothers to engage my feelings, it just comes straight for my eyes, but there's not a damn thing I can do about it, and I hate myself for it.

The surreptitious noseblow a discreet four minutes after the operative scene; my daughters are on to me, my wife; they all know exactly when to give me that quick, sidelong glance. What must they think of me?

In real life I don't cry any more when things hurt. Never a tear at seventeen when my mother died, my father. I never cried for my first marriage.

But today I often cry when things turn out well: an unexpected act of simple human decency; new evidence, against all odds, of how much someone loves me.

I think all this is why I never wanted a son. I always supposed my son would be like me, and that when he'd cry it would bring back every indelible humiliation of my own life,

and in some word or gesture I'd betray what I was feeling, and he'd mistake, and think I was ashamed of him. He'd carry that the rest of his life.

Daughters are easy: you pick them up, you hug them, you say, "There there. Everything is going to be all right." And for that moment you really believe that you can make enough of it right

enough. The unskilled labor of love. And if you cry a little with them for all the inevitable gratuitous meannesses of life, that crying is not to be ashamed of.

But for years my great fear was the moment I might have to deal with a crying son. But I don't have one. We came close once, between Megan and Kathleen; the doctors warned us there was something wrong,

and when Joan went into labor they said the baby would be born dead. But he wasn't: very briefly, before he died, I heard him cry.

Sometimes when we start a poem, we have no idea where it's going to take us.

I was nobody; nobody on the national scene had ever heard of me. The team competition was the only reason Devlin was there. But he loved my poem, and when the film "Slamnation" came out, I got significant screen time. Devlin even came up to Boston and interviewed me on the sidewalk outside the Cantab. In the course of the interview I said, "People ask if what we write is really Poetry. My rule for that is, first you have to write one thing that pretty much everybody agrees is a poem. That qualifies you for your poetic license. After that, if you say it's Poetry, it's Poetry." That particular quote has made me very popular among Slam poets.

And by the way, I know that that sounds flippant, but a lot of hard thinking went into it. I have never heard another definition of Poetry that includes all or even almost all of what is in fact widely accepted as Poetry.

"Slamnation" became a training film for slammers all over the country. The next time I went to Nationals was in 2000. On the first night we were introducing ourselves to one of the competing teams. I stuck out my hand to a young guy from the Chico, California team and said, "I'm Jack McCarthy." He said, "I know who you are."

Fame. How sweet it is. Even in very small doses. You never know how it's going to happen.

You play, you win; you play, you lose; you play.

It wouldn't be fair to talk about the poetry Slam without a brief exposition of the pros and cons. I don't know any slammer who doesn't have serious reservations about the whole process of reducing poetry to numbers assigned by judges chosen randomly from the audience.

Some critics find the whole approach to judging inappropriate, arguing that it encourages a "dumbing-down" of the poetry presented. That accusation is not without merit. Yet no less a literary icon than Samuel Johnson wrote, “By the common sense of readers uncorrupted with literary prejudices… must be finally decided all claim to poetic honors.” That quotation should be inscribed above the portal of every Slam venue.

I slam almost every week in Seattle because it's a chance to do three poems in front of a great audience.

I don't recommend the Poetry Slam for everyone, but open mikes are for just about anyyone. You may be sitting there thinking you're a really hot shit writer and it's just a matter of time till somebody discovers you and makes you rich and famous. Well maybe. But chances are you're wrong. And even if you are that good, how is anybody going to discover you if you're not putting anything out there?

It's easy to believe you're a great undiscovered talent when you've never tested your stuff. It's harder to kid yourself when you've sat at an open mike and heard what other people can do.

Here's another reason to frequent open mikes:

WE ARE THE WORST JUDGES OF OUR OWN MATERIAL

Once in awhile I finish a new poem and think, "I can't wait to read this someplace." Call that Category One. But far more often, the best it gets is, "I think I got that right." Meaning, "I think what I have said is honest, and I think I have said it about as well as I can." That's Category Two. Category Three is, "This is barely worth keeping; maybe I'll read it, maybe I won't."

In general, my most successful poems don't come from the Category One but from Category Two; and the successes that don't come from Category Two are pretty evenly divided between Category One and Category Three. I have some vague theories as to why this should be true; but all I really need to know is that We Are the Worst Judges of Our Own Material. If I don't try it out, I might throw away a winner.

And yes, if you go to open mikes, you're going to have to sit through a lot of crap. The science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon was asked why he wanted to write science fiction when 90% of science fiction was crap. He answered, quote, "90% of everything is crap." End quote. That has come to be known as Sturgeon's Law.

That doesn't mean an open mike is not worth listening to. You can learn as much from other people's failures as you can from their successes. The universe of mistakes you don't want to make is far greater than the little moon of successes you want to emulate. It's always easier to see those mistakes in other people's work.

It does mean that an open mike is nothing to be intimidated by, because bar isn't very high. And you're never to young to start—or, as in my case, never too old.

You argue, "Still, if 90% of it is crap, is the open mike really a good investment of my time?" I can answer that question only with another question: what would you be doing if you weren't at the open mike? And do you have another way of getting your stuff before an audience?

Not everybody was meant to be a writer. At an open mike you run into a lot of people trying on writing for size; many of them eventually decide it isn't a very good fit and move on in other directions. But it's been my observation that almost everybody has one or two really good poems in them, and one of the recurring pleasures of the open mike lies in watching these non-writers, over time, find those one or two good poems.

Here is another argument for open mikes. The first time you go you sit there thinking, "Not my turn, not my turn, not my turn—MY TURN!" Maybe somebody comes up to you afterward and tells you they enjoyed your piece. You vaguely remember that at some point in the proceedings, they too had stood at the mike with their lips moving, and you wish you remembered their piece enough to comment. So next time you listen a little better, and you find out that some of these people are pretty good, some of them even—hard as it is to believe—maybe better than you. You seek them out after the reading and tell them you enjoyed their stuff. And before you know it—Community is happening.

The Writer as Outsider is so true it's trite. Yet the most important message we have to deliver by our writing is We Are Not Alone. So why not hang out with others who are working the same territory? A community is a good thing for a writer to have. Why? Because in the long run you'll write more and write better.

There's an open mike I like in Tacoma on Friday nights. Friday is a terrible traffic day around Seattle, and sometimes it takes me over two hours to get to Tacoma. But I go because it's an appreciative quality audience. I can take the time because I'm retired now. But even when I was working, I would often drive an hour and a half one way to get to Cambridge, or Worcester, or Newburyport.

Which brings me to another important point:

TO BE THE KIND OF WRITER I AM, YOU NEED A RELIABLE CAR

That's a corollary of Don't Give Up Your Day Job.

The last thing I want to say about the open mike is that I think it might be the NEXT BIG THING. Think of it as Reality TV without the commercials; not a spectator sport, but a chance to participate. The day may come when the potatoes rise from their couches and look for something a little sexier than the tv. We just have to get the word out that this isn't Sunnydale, there is no curfew here; people are allowed to leave the house after dark.

One of my favorite gigs in Cambridge used to be a Sunday afternoon event called "In the Round" at Club Passim in Cambridge. Club Passim is mostly a folk music club; Dylan and Joan Baez performed there in the 60s, before they were big. "In the Round" comprised three folksingers and one poet. Most of the audience was there for the music; they weren't expecting anything from the poet. The reason I liked the gig so much was the way their faces would light up about 45 seconds into my first poem; it was an expression that said, "I didn't know anything like this existed."

I think it was a lot like my reaction to a particular speaker I heard in 1962, or to the first time I heard "A Child's Christmas in Wales," in 1964. I think there is a hunger out there for the particular delights of the spoken word, but it's a hunger many of us don't know we have. I may be kidding myself, but I think there is a huge, completely untapped market for what we're doing.

Before I finish, I want to put in a plug for The Writer's Almanac. It's a daily five-minute National Public Radio show that Garrison Keillor does. It always includes at least one poem. The entire text of the broadcast is available daily on the Internet. You can find it by googling writers almanac, and you can subscribe free. I started subscribing because I wanted to guarantee that I read at least one poem every day. I do it in the morning, at the end of my meditation routine, before the day gets away from me.

In addition to the poem, there are several paragraphs about the lives of successful writers. At first, I didn't bother reading the paragraphs, but I got hooked—remember, you're dealing with an addictive personality here. Over time, what fascinates me in the writers' histories is the wild differences in their career paths; that and the cliché of the blockbuster manuscript that was rejected by double-digit numbers of publishing houses, soon to be a major motion picture.

Read those stories and take heart.

You play, you win; you play, you lose; you play.

Bottom line: if writing doesn't bring you the rewards you expected as quickly as you expected them, that's not a reason to stop writing. There may be other rewards in the offing, rewards you haven't considered.

I'm going to end with a poem by Miller Williams. You might have heard of Miller Williams as the author of Bill Clinton's second inaugural poem, generally regarded as the best of the inaugural poems (although that's a pretty low bar too). He's also the founder of the highly respected University of Arkansas Press. And some of you will probably connect more with the fact that he's the father of the folksinger Lucinda Williams.

I think Miller Williams is the best poet in the country. I heartily recommend his selected poems, a book called Some Jazz A While. It is filled with delights and treasures.

This is a poem about the power of the spoken word. It's called "The Curator." You already know that I cry easily; I don't always make it through this, so I apologize in advance in case I lose it.

THE CURATOR by Miller Williams

We thought it would come, we thought the Germans would come, were almost certain they would. I was thirty-two, the youngest assistant curator in the country. I had some good ideas in those days.

Well, what we did was this. We had boxes precisely built to every size of canvas. We put the boxes in the basement and waited.

When word came that the Germans were coming in, we got each painting put in the proper box and out of Leningrad in less than a week. They were stored somewhere in southern Russia.

But what we did, you see, besides the boxes waiting in the basement, which was fine, a grand idea, you'll agree, and it saved the art— but what we did was leave the frames hanging, so after the war it would be a simple thing to put the painting back where they belonged.

Nothing will seem surprised or sad again compared to those imperious, vacant frames.

Well, the staff stayed on to clean the rubble after the daily bombardments. We didn't dream— You know it lasted nine hundred days. Much of the roof was lost and snow would lie sometimes a foot deep on this very floor, but the walls stood firm and hardly a frame fell.

Here is the story, now, that I want to tell you. Early one day, a dark December morning, we came on three young soldiers waiting outside, pacing and swinging their arms against the cold. They told us this: in three homes far from here all dreamed of one day coming to Leningrad to see the Hermitage, as they supposed every Soviet citizen dreamed of doing. Now they had been sent to defend the city, a turn of fortune the three could hardly believe.

I had to tell them there waas nothing to see but hundreds and hundreds of frames where the paintings had hung.

"Please, sir," one of them said, "let us see them."

And so we did. It didn't seem any stranger than all of us being there in the first place, inside such a building, strolling in the snow.

We led them around most of the major rooms, what they could take the time for, wall by wall. Now and then we stopped and tried to tell them part of what they would see if they saw the paintings.. I told them how those colors would come together, described a brushstroke here, a dollop there, mentioned a model and why she seemed to pout and why this painter got the roses wrong.

The next day a dozen waitied for us, then thirty or more, gathered in twos and threes. Each of us took a group in a different direction: Castangno, Caravaggio, Brueghel, Cezanne, Matisse, Orozco, Manet, da Vinci, Goya, Vermeer, Picasso, Uccello, your Whistler, Wood and Gropper. We painted to more details about the paintings, I venture to say, than if we had had them there, some unexpected use of line or light, balance or movement, facing the cluster of faces the same way we'd done it every morning before the war, but then we didn't pay so much attention to what we talked about. People could see for themselves. As a matter of fact we'd sometimes said our lines as if they were learned out of a book, with hardly a look at the paintings.

But now the guide and the listeners paid attention to everything—the simple differences between the first and post-impressionists, romantic and heroic, shade and shadow.

Maybe this was a way to gorget the war a little while. Maybe more than that. whatever it was, the people continued to come. It came to be called The Unseen Collection.

Here. here is the story I want to tell you. Slowly, blind people began to come. A few at first then more of them every morning, some led and some alone, some swaying a little. They leaned and listened hard, they screwed their faces, they seemed to shift their eyes, those that had them,, to see better what was being said. And a cock of the head. My God, they paid attention.

After the siege was lifted and the Germans left and the roof was fixed and the paintings were in their places, the blind never came again. Not like before. This seems strange, but what I think it was, they couldn't see the paintings anymore. They could still have listened, but the lectures became a little matter-of-fact. What can I say? Confluences come when they will and they go away.