Why I Don't Write Children's Literature

by Gary Soto

  Carolyn supplied it.

  “Carolyn — that’s right.”

  The band started loudly, then remembered their directive — shush, or else! They played the song softly, while we clapped along. When it was over, we applauded softly — this was too much fun.

  “Where’s George?” Carolyn asked, figuring that, with so few of us, we could talk to the performers between songs.

  “He had to work,” John answered.

  George is moonlighting?

  John strummed his guitar, ready to kick-start another song. He stopped when the women next us rose to leave, one of them noisily twisting the top of her plastic shopping bag. They had been rudely yakking domestic triviality throughout the set. Couldn’t they sense that this moment would never happen again? Still, I was troubled by their imminent departure.

  “If you two leave,” I said jokingly, “then there will be only half an audience.” The pigeon had already winged itself away.

  One of the women squinted at me as if her eyes were binoculars. “It’s not my responsibility to be the audience,” she said curtly.

  If I’d worn a toupee on my scalp, it would have flown off upon hearing that remark. I did not like this woman. As she and her friend walked away, I was glad that their polyester pantsuits didn’t fit!

  “This goes out to Carol,” said Sir Paul.

  Close enough.

  The band played “She Loves You,” this time a little louder. When that song ended, John said, “And this next one goes out to Carol.”

  Carolyn smiled and felt special. They did “A Hard Day’s Night,” followed by a reprise of “Michelle,” also for Carol, their dedicated groupie, who applauded slightly beyond the permitted sound level. During her eager clapping, I saw that my girl had decided to go braless — nasty thing!

  The Beatles got loud on “Rain,” dispelling any notion that they were not good musicians. This song, a favorite of mine, is hauntingly complex, and they played it well, even with only one guitar. John’s vocals measured up — who cared if his socks were white?

  “Where you folks from?” Paul asked.

  Berkeley, we answered.

  “Do you have a business card?” Carolyn asked.

  They shook their heads no, all three of them. They asked how we had heard about the concert, and we told them the newspaper.

  They did “And I Love Her,” sung by Ringo, and “P.S. I Love You,” sung by both John and Paul, with harmonies added by Gary and Carolyn, their backup singers. The summer evening was silly, free, and memorable.

  Carolyn and I snuggled against each other. We stayed until the very end because, as long as the music played, the Beatles lived on.

  THIRTEEN STEREOTYPES ABOUT POETS

  It’s a disappointment that I’m not invited to parties more often because I possess an extensive social armor in the form of twelve suits, including a rare Paul Smith three-piece — rare in that there is only one other like it in the United States. To my mind, it’s very close to “bespoke,” meaning that a tailor, working from my slender measurements, made it just for me. I’m disappointed because I want to be present at a party where a mid-level techie — wine glass in his right hand, cracker in his left — asks, “What do you do?”

  “I’m a poet,” I would answer, nibbling on my own cracker, sipping from my own drink. “Gee, this is a nice party. Look, there’s more food coming!”

  And you live where? the techie might wonder, in his semi-vegan heart. But aloud he says, “Interesting. I read a short poem about black birds once. Didn’t understand it at all.” Cracker crumbs fall from his lower lip. His cell phone lights up and I disappear from his thoughts for seconds — no, for good. He turns away.

  Still, I get to mingle with others at the party. I scan the scene and sip my wine. It’s good stuff — a blend of silliness, with just a touch of hilly ravine. Got to get a case of this, I remind myself.

  In short, poets are misread. We’re like others in that we have hearts and lungs, money and then no money, and places to go — even if it’s by foot. If you call with an invitation to us older poets, on a landline, we will make every effort to come.

  Poets Wear Berets

  We are no longer partial to berets, though we’ve all seen them tilted smartly on heads, both male and female. Admittedly, they’re attractive head coverings, but only for the generation before 1960, and only if you were European with an owl-shaped face. Still, if a contemporary poet wears a beret it should be made of wool and smell of tobacco and worry — worry for the next poem and the next meal. When we do don hats, I’m afraid it’s the dumbed-down baseball-cap look — or a beanie, like that guy in U2. People assume that’s what poets look like — like the beanie guy. But no, that’s more like a rocker with a really expensive guitar.

  Poets Are Silent and Reflective Types

  If drinks are free for more than two hours — and if the party extends to another venue, offering more of the same — a poet can get really loud. He might collapse to his knees, roll onto his side, and keep talking, even while the brain has given up and the eyes resemble salmon eggs. The collapsed poet does not go quietly into the night. Though crumpled on the floor, his lips are still moving slightly.

  “Bush,” the poet mumbles, “George Bush started it all . . . Rosebud, rosebud . . .”

  Some smarty remarked that we poets come into the world not knowing a single word. After we have honed the ancient craft, however, we won’t shut up. But we also come into the world expecting a proper drink, right away.

  “Where’s mommy?” the newborn poet asks, then wails.

  Poets Like Flowers

  Sniffing them, we think of our future funerals, when an organ moans and the mourners, other poets in out-of-style ties, are keen to the aroma of vittles in the adjacent room. Flowers, of course, are beautiful in a vase, on half-price calendars, and when presented to us with the Nobel Prize for Literature. This big daddy of all awards most likely doesn’t happen, however, and we will have no occasion to shake hands with a real king and bow to his wife, the queen, thin as a tulip. But if it should occur, we would wear a red boutonniere, the color of the blood we spilled getting there.

  Poets Vote Democrat

  Yes, most darken those zeros in the voting booth in favor of Democrats. But a few vote Republican. Generally, these poets iron their jeans and then re-iron them, with sharp creases. Republican poets are always men.

  Poets Don’t Work

  We are apt to work hard — as long as we don’t have to bend over too much. We work for figures just north of minimum wage, correcting college papers that often begin, “In today’s society,” and teaching creative writing workshops where babyish students complain, “You just want us to write like you.” We appreciate work that ends about five o’clock and committee meetings that take no longer than the time in which to eat a sandwich. We like paychecks, but fret at all the deductions on the paystub. All those taxes never benefit poets.

  Unbalanced, Poets Must Hang onto Things When They Walk

  Sylvia Plath put her head inside an oven — we know at least this much about her. Delmore Schwartz drank himself to death, and so did Dylan Thomas. Virginia Woolf, a prose writer with a poet’s sensibility, put rocks into her apron and walked into a cold river. In short, the public thinks that we’re unbalanced and steps back to give us room. But poets are well balanced. Consider how poets start off the day. We put on our socks first, then our pants, or maybe the other way around — pants first, then socks. We’re able to dress ourselves.

  Poetry Slams Are for Everyone

  Poets in a slam rhyme like this: “I was a’gonna fall / before the call / but big beautiful doll / hecka pale and tall / you feel me, y’all?” After some soft clapping from the audience, the poet swings his hair from his right shoulder to his left. Then he begins another: “Skinny but mad / fruitfully glad / mom and dad / like frowned at ‘Brad’ / but my words, sugar babe, ain’t that bad.” These slams start at about 7:00 p.m. and end when we turn about twenty-five
.

  Poets Drink Too Much Coffee

  Like the regular Joes and Josephinas of the world, we savor our morning brew. We drink two cups, get that sweet vibe going, then head to work on BART. In our office, we’re blasted by fluorescent light bulbs, but on our desk we have a potted plant to soothe our eyes.

  “How’s it going?” a workmate asks.

  “I stapled my tie to the desk — that’s how it’s going,” the poet answers. “You seen the scissors?”

  We don’t sit in cafes jotting down ideas for poems that may or may not happen. Poets like their coffee with lots of cream and with sugar — two spoonfuls will sweeten the day.

  Poets Listen to NPR

  While driving a cheapo rental, poets may cruise the radio stations, halt briefly at NPR’s “All Things Considered,” and growl, “Oh, yeah, a station for the Volvo crowd.” When a reporter begins, in an urgent voice, “Today in Australia a kangaroo was found sitting among rocks at low tide,” poets snort, “Yeah, but what about me? I sat there and no one gave a shit.” Poets search for a station with loud music.

  Poets Need Sensitivity Training

  A famous poet and his semi-famous friend commiserated over a prestigious prize that neither received. It instead had gone to a very famous poet.

  “Get over it,” the famous poet scolded. “Bury the hatchet.”

  “Good idea!” the semi-famous poet roared. “I’ll bury in it in his forehead.”

  Poets Understand Dreams

  We sleep in narrow or wide beds and we dream narrowly or widely. To our analysts, we report with mild urgency dreams such as this: “When I went into the bathroom I saw a polar bear drinking from the toilet. He raised his face with little drops of water dripping from his chops, and chased me down the hallway. We both ran in slow motion, but since he was more powerful he caught me and, well, gave me a bear hug.”

  Analyst (tapping pencil against his leg — so Freudian): “Were there ice cubes involved?”

  Poets Live on the Top Floor of the Ivory Tower

  We live in houses with lots of windows, or apartments with some windows, or shared spaces with only one window, which we climb through when we’ve forgotten the key. We live in tents when the going is hard or with our parents when the going is really hard. No poet lives too richly. We don’t shine the silver or dust the chandelier or take tally of the Royal Copenhagen china. We seldom dwell in large houses with more than two bathrooms. When we do, it’s because our wife or husband or lover is the one with money. Even then, we feel a little embarrassed when we show our guests the view from the great room.

  Poets Smell

  Ghastly rumor! We shower and we wash our fleshy mitts. Some solitary days we contemplate the grime under our fingernails, grime that if analyzed in a lab would reveal pencil lead. We write poems that work and poems that don’t work. When we sweat, we provide the world with an unusual odor. “What’s that?” a curious business-type might ask, as he sniffs the confines of an elevator. Dogs howl at our sides as they recall from their canine past some primordial longing that involved the first Neanderthal poets. People hurry out of the elevator before the poet can say, “It’s me! I’ve just finished a poetry manuscript. The perfume is called ‘Essence of Limited Edition.’ ”

  SNARKY

  When I told a poet friend that I was a card-carrying member of the Northern California Daffodil Association — and had won six ribbons for my little beauties — he was seated at the dining table, his fingers working on an unstrung abacus of pills. He looked up, showing me the flatness of his judgmental eyes.

  “Daffodils?” he grumbled. “You should wear the ribbons in your bonnet. Fuck, Gary.”

  As he looked back down, a smile was building on my face. I pictured myself wearing a bonnet, tooling around Berkeley in an old lady’s Buick, one hand pushing the ribbons out of my face. I was glad I hadn’t mentioned my involvement in flower arranging.

  Thirty-five years earlier, while drunkenly watching a football game on television, I had declared to this same friend that I sported a hefty tool in my pants. He had looked at me while guiding a beer bottle toward his face. His puckered lips met the bottle. He swallowed an ounce or two of foamy brew, then remarked, “Soto, you’re the only guy I know who can fit his dick inside a drinking straw.”

  What am I to do? This poet visits again in two weeks. Together we’ll troll a David Hockney exhibit in San Francisco, among other activities. The last time I saw this poet I greeted him on the front walk and began with a snarky, “Hey, the mail just came. You want to see what a royalty check looks like?”

  He laughed as he walked penguin-like toward the front door, carrying a suitcase that looked like a doctor’s black bag. Indeed, it contained his medications. I would not have been surprised if he’d pulled out a stethoscope or a roll of gauze to wrap himself like a mummy. He’s a big guy, and I wondered if the bag could contain enough gauze.

  But these days, we’re not laughing. We’re older now and the trees are trimmed of leaves. Bird nests are visible, but the nests are cold. How much longer do we have to walk and gab? Friends of ours have died already. He has lost his cat, a little beast with a heart-shaped spot on his back. It saddened him that the cat had to be put down. I wish I could unscrew the top of his head and fill it with flowers. I want my friend to be happy.

  How old will we be when the pen rolls from my fingers? Do I have time to write a novel about a man whose three watches stopped when his wife passed away? A novel about a once snarky poet who is now full of gloom the color of ash? The poet possesses one cat, a white-whiskered fellow as old as he. One day, the poet considers his own hands, which have written thirteen books and dozens of articles on English porcelain. Unlike the cat, the poet never had much of a bite. His tail wagged, but women didn’t prance in front of him. He never possessed much in the way of manly armor, even in youth — no ripple of muscle moving like a trout when he flexed his biceps.

  Forget the novel and the novel’s sidekick, poetry. I’ll plant my trumpet-faced daffodils and tap the soil until they come up in February. I’ll wait for my friend, who’ll arrive with his medicine bag and sit at the dining table, his fingers counting out pills. If I tell him that I’ve won more ribbons, he might look up and consider another comedic line. Then again, he might be too busy counting: one for heart, one for memory, two for bones. If I begin a joke, say the ditty about the pony that got a half-price ticket to the zoo, he’ll become confused and tell me to shut my trap. He’ll shake his head at me. Starting over, he’ll stare at the pills lined up like soldiers, and begin again . . . one for memory, one for bones, two for heart.

  I’m tenderhearted for this friend. I would shake the whole bottle of heart pills down his gullet to keep him going. At our age, the best medicines are the quiet nature of clouds as they paddle east and the rain that dampens the ground around the apple tree. When we look down, we can see our wet footprints glistening in the everlasting sun.

  HOMAGE

  In late summer of 1974, I was reading One Hundred of Years of Solitude in an apartment that felt like solitude. I didn’t have much in the way of furniture — bed, stove, noisy refrigerator. I would soon be off to graduate school, off to an intellectual shore as foreign as Europe, namely classes in unfathomable literary theory, which was like looking up at a bank of buzzing neon instead of the natural sunlight filtered through trees. I would read Michel Foucault and think, “People get what he means?”

  I read the novel in front of a frantically spinning fan in Fresno’s intense summer heat. I was twenty-one, slender but not starving, and so transfixed by the story that I didn’t fully grasp the grand experience or the remarkable nature of García Márquez’s descriptive energy and wildly inventive settings. Wasn’t most literature like this? In graduate school I discovered the answer — no.

  As an English major at Fresno State College, I had been pointed toward such writers. Still, I didn’t realize at the time that García Márquez was like no other, that he would take his place among th
e greatest — but what would that realization have meant to me, anyway? I was just looking for a good book to read while the summer roasted us to the color of raisins, Fresno’s main product.

  I recall gazing up from the novel, sizing up the blank walls of my apartment, and then returning to the pages of One Hundred Years of Solitude — the floral landscapes, the rivers with miraculous fish, the exotic birds like fruit in the trees. I read slowly, with quiet appreciation. I was swept away by the narrative, traveling to the fictional town of Macondo, where the citizens had a penchant for both melancholia and nostalgia. And the birds? There were birds galore.

  Fresno is definitely not Macondo. Nevertheless, I went in search of my own fabulous territory. I biked to south Fresno, where I grew up, discovering the vacant lots where homes had been torn down in the name of urban renewal. Weeds grew in feisty bunches; feral cats peeked from behind the weeds; and dogs, thin as shadows, loped about abandoned cars, their rims and tires gone. I rolled my bike tire over a squad of chinaberries, and the scent of their broken skins evoked my childhood. My own sense of melancholia built up inside me like one large tear. Wasn’t this the plum tree that I climbed when I was six? And this stream of shattered glass, didn’t it look familiar? I rolled down the alley, the broken glass like a trail, leading to the 7-Up Bottling Company. That was the place where I, a child as feral as any cat, had once stood gazing at the mouth of the open building, until a kind employee handed me a soda.

  Some of this is fabricated, of course, though the essence is true. It is the stuff of a young poet in search of a subject, a sense of place. It is his own Byronic posturing, his own Macondo — minus the lush jungle; Fresno is a hot, flat place, its dry river choked with tumbleweeds and dumped tires. One Hundred Years of Solitude woke inside me a dedication to place. It evoked in me the value of the seemingly valueless. Under this pile of rotting boards could be the story of a large rat with a long tail — no, let’s make that the shortest rat with the longest tail. García Márquez did that to me, did that to all young poets. He allowed us to enhance the world as we saw fit.