Getting hired to work on staff at mid-’70s Marvel Comics was a dream come true. And having the chance to write comics both for them, and after I went freelance, for DC Comics as well, and being able to play with such characters as Captain Marvel, Supergirl, Spider-Man, The Vision, and others was a joy.

So why, when I applied to the Clarion Science Fiction Writing Workshop in 1979, did I beg them to let me in so I could turn my back on comics?

Over the years, I’ve offered up two reasons —

The first is that during my years in the field, my fiction output dwindled severely. Before turning from comics fan to comics pro, I was writing short stories endlessly. Sometimes one a week. Sometimes even more frequently than that, because in an essay for one of the Clarion anthologies, Harlan Ellison explained (or perhaps someone else told of his week teaching there) how he asked students to write a story a day during his stint. I can’t remember the purpose of such an exercise, but whatever its reason, I lasted three days.

But those stories continued to pour out of me … until I went to work in comics. It’s a difficult thing to bring yourself to work on a story which might take years to sell, when every word I could write in comics and hand in one week — from letter columns to splash pages for the British reprint books to ad copy — would earn me a check the following week. Sometimes that payment only took days. Which is why when I encountered the following George Bernard Shaw quote, it resonated mightily: “If you want to be a writer, you must have money, otherwise people will throw money at your head to buy your talent to use it and distort it for their own frivolous purpose.” I knew that if I didn’t wean myself from the comics income, I might never return to working on my fiction in earnest.

More importantly, though, I found my time in comics was damaging my actual ability to write the fiction I wanted. My time at Marvel was spent aping Stan Lee. So facile was I at that task I even wrote the Bullpen Bulletins copy for a while. (Don’t worry — Stan always wrote those Soapboxes himself.) But what I found was that because I was young and immature — I started on staff at Marvel at only 19 — I was unable to maintain a wall between the style of writing I did for myself and the one I used for comics. My short stories were beginning to sound like Stan, filled with bombast and alliteration. I realized that if I didn’t leave comics, I might never find my own voice.

So I broke away, working a series of non-creative jobs which protected that part of myself. It wasn’t until the early ’90s that I’d matured enough to allow myself a creative staff job — creating and editing Science Fiction Age magazine — knowing I no longer had to fear the loss of my voice.

My journey into and then out of the comics industry is much more complicated than that, with many twists and turns, and when asked how I could walk away from such a magical field, I’ve often expounded on all of the above in greater detail. But just the other day, I stumbled across a poem by Robert Graves titled “Epitaph on an Unfortunate Artist” which explains my quandary far more succinctly than I ever could —

He found a formula for drawing comic rabbits:
The formula for drawing comic rabbits paid.
So in the end he could not change the tragic habits
This formula for drawing comic rabbits made.

I consider myself lucky to have gotten away in time, before those tragic habits became unchangeable.

Poet Robert Hass, who won the $100,000 Wallace Stevens Awards last year from the Academy of American Poets, was one of 14 people interviewed for the January/February 2015 issue of Esquire about their 2014.

Among the many interesting things Hass had to say was this.

My younger brother once said to my mother, “I don’t know why Bob writes poetry. Nobody reads it.” And my mother said to him, “Yes, but they don’t read it for a long time.”

Here’s hoping we all have readers who don’t read us for a long time. Or something like that.

Mothers always put these things in perspective, don’t they?

Friday, I finished a new story—my sixth of the year, so yay, me!—and sent it off to market.

Yesterday, I reread the full manuscript of a novel of mine—one that three major publishers sat on for a combined nine years—in order to decide whether it was worth revisiting.

And today, having come to the conclusion that, yes, there is enough good and true and real in for me not to abandon it, I’ll begin the work of bringing it up to my 2014 standards. (Or trying to anyway.)

What do I mean by that?

I’ll let Kenneth Koch explain.

While in the basement looking for an electronic file of the piece so I won’t have to re-key in every word before beginning revisions, I came across my copy of one of my favorite poems, a poem which, among other things, will show why I’ve vacillated for so long about whether or not I should try marketing this work again.

It’s Koch’s “The Art of Poetry,” which to me rings true about all writing, not just poetry, and you can read the whole thing over at the Poetry Foundation site. I urge you to do just that, but the relevant section explaining my hesitation is this: (more…)

How much did we love bicycles in 1898?

So much so that the January 1898 issue of The Nickell was packed with ads for bikes and biking accessories, such as the Columbia Chainless Bicycle (“totally unaffected by mud, dust, rain, or sleet”), the “Serrate Tread” Tire (if your dealer doesn’t have the new ’98 model, “tell him he’s not up to date), and The Wheelmen’s Gazette (“an illustrated monthly magazine devoted to the grandest, healthiest, most manly sport in the world—cycling”).

But what really proved to me that bicycling wasn’t just a hobby in those days, but a craze, was the poem “Ye Ballad of Ye Mermaiden,” in which a mermaid was spellbound … by a cyclist.

Or the wheelman’s “wondrous shell on which you travel so fast and well,” anyway.

I assume “she scorches beneath the sea” in the poem’s final line merely meant she was going very fast. But if you’ve got a better handle on the slang of the late 19th century, let me know!

A few years ago, the publisher Alfred A. Knopf started a program to celebrate Poetry month—this month—by e-mailing a poem a day to those of us who signed up for the service. I always forget all about it until the next April 1 rolls around, at which time I start receiving the first of 31 daily poems.

Today’s e-mail contained the title poem from Mary Jo Salter’s A Phone Call to the Future: New & Selected Poems, which seemed relevant to those of you who wander here. I won’t reprint the entire poem, but if the opening section below intrigues you, you can listen to it read by the author in its entirely here.

Here’s how it begins: (more…)