On the Desire to be Famous.
A sestina, some nostalgia, and Seneca chimes in.
This is Poiesis, where I occasionally share poems, learn how to make them, and examine how they draw our attention to things that matter and how they change our minds.
Dear You—
As I keep returning to this space here, to Metanoia Road, I confront the same terrifying question every morning. Why write?
I have been writing ever since I could hold a writing implement. Yet, the practice of writing—
—if I am being truthful, and it’s not always clear that I am being truthful. First thoughts and first sentences may, in fact, be borrowed thoughts and sentences, and it takes time, it takes writing and writing and thinking and thinking again and again, over and over, to get to the truth, and even then, you don’t know you’ve reached the truth, because if you keep writing . . . you will change your mind again . . . maybe —
— the practice of writing always seems like a provocation, a duty, it feels like work, life work.
Twenty years ago, I considered myself a serious writer. A professional. I was working as a full-time writer at a newspaper. For a time, writing was my sole reason for living, the single thing I wanted to do. And my living space and my social spaces reflected that. I was living alone in Mets in Athens, Greece. I had a single mattress on the bedroom floor. I had a table positioned in the middle of the small living room. I had a chair. I had a laptop. I had notebooks. I had pens. I had piles of books—fiction and poetry and philosophy in Greek and English—and the authors of those books were my closest friends. I made coffee and pasta in the kitchen. I smoked on the balcony. After a day of writing for the newspaper, I would return home, climb up to the rooftop with a beer and a notebook. I would take in the magnificent view of Athens, and the corner of the Acropolis I could see from my rooftop. I had begun exploring what would become my first novel, Palimpsest.1 This was what I did. This was my life. I wanted it to last forever. It didn’t — but that story is for another letter.
Later, when I moved to a more remote location in Greece—this was early 2000s—I joined Zoetrope, an online community for writers, filmmakers and other artists launched by Francis Ford Coppola. My first readers of my novel were the writer friends I made there: Jai, Wendy, Kay, Debra, Tom, Ramesh, Sandra, Mary, Avital, Charles, Thea, Judith, Liz. We all had private writing rooms where we’d discuss the writer’s craft and life.
But, a few days ago, I discovered that the 25-year-old Zoetrope writing community would be shutting down on June 15.
I returned to the site. Logged in. The site was designed in the early 2000s and seeing that space instantly transported me back to those years. The site was so well built and maintained by Tom Edgar, and it was free thanks to Francis Ford Coppola. The best thing was that we could share writing for peer review, and we could track our reviews and points.
I clicked into my archive and looked at the pieces of writing I had submitted for peer-review. There were the early chapters of Palimpsest, which had received 10 reviews and a score of “Excellent” and 9.1.
I discover a sestina
My archive also reveals that I was working on poetry too. I remember now that after working on my novel in the mornings, I would spend some time working on poems. For a while, I was learning the different forms—sonnets, ghazals, villanelles, sestinas. My goal was to write a poem in each form.
Which brings me to the poem in this letter! It is a sestina:
39 lines
a pattern of repeating end words
usually unrhymed (thank the poetry gods!)
six stanzas
final envoi (a three line summarising stanza)
The pattern of repeating end words traditionally follows this pattern (each number corresponds to the end word and each row is a stanza)2:
1 2 3 4 5 6
6 1 5 2 4 3
3 6 4 1 2 5
5 3 2 6 1 4
4 5 1 3 6 2
2 4 6 5 3 1
(6 2) (1 4) (5 3)
I’m not sure I quite got there but I’m close! (Sharing the poem below.)
Did I want to be famous at 33?
So, this was me twenty-two years ago, age thirty-three. Meditating on fame; playing with poetic form. Feeling very serious about myself as a writer. The most serious I have ever been, I think.
Did I wish I would become a famous writer? You know, I think I did.
But I don’t think I had a coherent understanding of fame. Nor an understanding of fame’s relationship to the work of writing and creativity, or to my life itself.
Maybe you can’t get to a coherent philosophy of fame until you have been famous? Take this statement made by Iron Maiden’s Bruce Dickinson in a Guardian interview back in 2014:
I'm not interested in being famous. Fame is the excrement of creativity, it’s the shit that comes out the back end, it’s a by-product of it. People think it’s the excrement that you should be eating. It’s not. It’s the creativity and the audience and being there in the moment.3
Similarly, Mike Myers:
Don’t want to be famous. Want to be legendary, but in many ways, fame is the industrial disease of creativity – it’s a sludgy byproduct of making things.4
Seneca chimes in
Still, in its most benign form, the desire for fame is linked to some deep desire to be witnessed, to have been known. Creative output, because it is often beautiful, attracts the attention of others and—by virtue of this attention to our creative offerings—we might just be remembered. For a time at least.
I am reminded of a memorable paragraph in one of Seneca’s letters. Seneca5 is known as a Stoic philosopher and generally writes from that standpoint but he is a wonderfully complex and contradictory character and so you get to see him angry and proud and, in Letter 21 to Lucilius, he is convinced that he will be remembered.
In this letter, we can see that Seneca has a strong sense of himself as a talented writer and believes his writing will be remembered and read well into the future.
Sure, he understands how “deep” is the “abyss of time that will close over us” but for a time, at least, his talent and his fame will endure:
. . . some talented minds will raise their heads above it [the deep abyss] and although they too must eventually depart into silence, yet for long will they resist oblivion and assert their freedom.6
He tells his friend to focus on his study, on the work, to develop his talents. It is this that will make him famous—not making connections with the famous, the powerful, the influencers. This is because others will write about those who study and work and develop their talents.
I promise to you, Lucilius: I shall find favour with posterity, and I can bring others’ names along with me, so that they will endure as well.7
Seneca also seems to think that poetry has the power to endure time, and in the same letter, quotes Virgil whose mention of two soldiers ensures the survival of their reputation through literature:
Fortunate pair! If there is anything
that poems of mine can do, no future day
will ever erase you from the memory
of ages
Two takeaways so far from this rambling post.
Work and write hard. Develop your talent. Focus on the work in the present moment. Your fame is not up to you, but the quality of your work is your only passport to enduring memory (though eventually you will be forgotten).
Write about others, celebrate them, quote their work, repeat their names. The abyss will eventually close over us, as each of us dies, but we can resist oblivion for a while, if we hold others’ memories alive in our writing.
And now it’s time for me to share this poem8, which I wrote 22 years ago, when I was learning about form and contemplating fame and just having bold, wild fun with my 33-year-old voice—sometimes such a stranger to me today, a version of me I hardly recognise. Yet, there she is!
On the Desire to be Famous
On the Desire to be Famous by Kathryn Koromilas Because I've not been written about in history, I'll do these things. Because no one knows my name, no one knows all the things to be envied in me. Because I want to be bloody filthy famous, I'm off to cash in on my fifteen and it's rush hour at the Warhol. I could turn into a can, shoot a Warhol work of art in the head just to make history. I'm alert for any microphone-plugged fifteen seconds. Spark a public probe into my name, commit petty crime, use mug shot when I'm famous. Then my FAQ will tell everything about me. I'll compose an urban myth about myself all innuendo and quirky incident. Warhol sorry he never met me. I'll go to school for famous people, manipulate air waves with my tragic history (invented, of course), then spread my wings and my name on a glossy and get you to vote my style in the Top 15. I'll sleep my way around the tube, impress in fifteen or less, set TV on fire, make everyone want to love me, cook 5-minute soups on morning shows. Sign my name in fifty languages (bet Andrew Bloody Warhola couldn't). I've read Wittgenstein! Know his story, like I know my heart. People with less are famous. I'll star in my own tabloid, talk show, be famous in my own bedroom, just one of my fifteen technical tricks. I'll write my own version of history; be so famous that even I'll be curious about me. I'll plug my house into my plotless life (so Warhol!), smash the wall, window onto street and stamp my surname. People will instantly know me by one name. something in an obscure tongue that I'll make famous. Google'll find more of me than the half million Warhols clogging the cyber fame-way. I'm scrawling "I'm famous" fifteen thousand times, ritual-style, so some god hears me and writes my goddamned name in history. Write my name in history! I'll become famous. I'll trip off the tongues of consumers so fifteen and fifty year olds alike buy me like they buy Warhol.
Meet me in the comments section:
Did anything here resonate with you? What do you think about fame? Fame and writing? Will your writing endure through time? How much time? I’d love to know.
I will write about my first novel in a future letter. In brief, Palimpsest was published in Australia in 2010 by a gorgeous but small independent publisher, Australian Scholarly Publishing. The novel was received well but was not sold beyond Australia. A year ago, after attending a Q&A hosted by the London Writers’ Salon, I learnt that I could request to have rights returned. And I did! I’m not sure what I will do. I may publish it myself, possibly even on Metanoia Road! Anything is possible! 💙
Seneca’s Letter 21 to Lucilius, translation Margaret Graver.
Seneca’s Letter 21 to Lucilius, translation Margaret Graver.
Your story reminded me of a time years ago when I was painting and working under the mentorship of the Canadian painter Duncan de Kergommeaux. One day, I was working on a painting of mine in his studio. I thought I was alone. Suddenly, a voice from behind me said, “You are a painter.” It was Duncan. Being young and praised by my mentor, my head swelled. Duncan followed with, “I didn’t say you were a great painter. I said you were a painter.” He explained that most of his other students saw painting as a subject on their timetable. They came at the allotted time painted and left until the following week. He recognized that I came to the studio to paint at almost every free opportunity. He also said that it didn’t matter whether I was good or not. The important thing was that I came to paint. Fame he told me was out of my hands. It depended on so many other external circumstances and opinions. I’ve never forgot that lesson. I eventually became a storyteller and writer. I’ve been working at my craft for nearly 25 years. Fame is irrelevant. What matters is the joy I experience at creating and following my passion and curiosity.
I love your writing, Katherine. Thank you.
That was fun! I want to try my hand at a sestina now!