“…I am more content with my barefoot rank than I ever was while running hard on ambition’s treadmill.
It’s not been a smooth road, I should add. Nor do I imagine I will ever achieve the perfect writerly bliss of non-ambition. As Donald Hall once noted in an essay, “nothing is learned once that does not need learning again”—nothing important, anyway, I believe. The old corrosive and envy-laden sense of ambition does appear in my soul on a regular basis, despite my best intentions. But I know what to do about it, at least. I send a poem I love to some friends. I attend an open mic and recite a poem by someone else. Every year I introduce my students to great poets of the past and cheer them in their own attempts to master the art. I swap new drafts with fellow poets. I write an essay like this one when asked, and hope in return to receive some comments, not from posterity but from you, Gentle Reader. I re-read Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman as needed, and remind myself how delicious it can feel to walk barefoot through this world.”
–from “My Barefoot Rank” by Davd Graham
found in Verse Wisconsin Issue 106 (July 2011)
