thoughts on artistic success – letter to a friend
By:  Norman J. Olson

thanks for the chapbook about Steve Richmond…  about whom I knew pretty much nothing except that he was mentioned in Bukowski’s biography and was apparently an admirer, emulator and to some degree sycophant of Bukowski…  reading this got me thinking about fame, celebrity and artistic success, whatever that is…

in my many years of involvement with the small press, I have seen many poets come and go…  when I first started publishing, I found it amazing to just be in print…  to have an editor think my poor words worthy of publication…  later, I tried to get into more “prestigious” journals (i.e. those published by university creative writing departments, or respected independents like the Chiron Review)… when that happened, I thought of having a poetry book published…  it seemed to me kind of an exercise in futility to self publish…  but, I did self publish several very small runs of chapbooks including “15 Image Poems”… etc… anyway…  but, I knew these were worthless reputation wise because they did not undergo the scrutiny of an editor…  so, I simply printed twenty or thirty of them and passed them out to acquaintances in the literary press world who were interested in my work…  I must say, that I never had any thoughts of making a living from art/writing… or indeed, any money at all…  

I decided that I would not do a poetry reading unless someone asked me to do one and I would not publish a book of any kind unless an editor asked me too… needless to say, I did few readings and no books…  until a few years ago when a French poet and publisher who liked my work asked me to put together a book so, I did and he published it on the print on demand site LULU…  where it still is, if anybody wants to buy a copy for $4.50 (of which, I get nothing…  LOL)   it is called “44 Image Poems”… I was also asked to put together a book of prose writing which I did for publisher in India and the result is “Writing about Travel and Art plus a few Memoirs of My Rural Childhood”… which you can find at Amazon or Barnes and Noble…

when I first started publishing, I noticed that some of the poets were older and as they started dying, I had the amazing, to me, realization that these poets dropped from the little recognition they ever had into a complete and total oblivion as if they had never existed…  this is even more true today when so many of the journals are on line…  when the journal folds, it disappears like a drop of tar dropped into a black and bottomless abyss… so, when a poet died there was not even the survival of some coffee stained mimeographed journal with his/her words, unread on the shelf of Brown University Library to note the poet’s brief tenancy in this vale of tears…  as the cliché has it, fame (in the literary press world) is indeed fleeting and will not survive the passing of the poet, or even the electronic dissolution of the on line journal that published his/her work…  

Richmond, like so many artists, seems, in spite of his disclaimers, to have had some notion of the importance of art and more especially his art as being some how a big deal…  well, whatever gets you through the night, but during my years of making art and writing poetry, a great many poets and artists have made a lot of art, nearly all of which is mostly worthless as anything other than a brief bubble of artistic ego expansion…  and pretty much all of which will cease to even exist within a few hours of the expiration of the artist/poet, and/or the literary journal in which it was published…

when I was young and wanted desperately to have the local museum of modern art accept my work and put it in an exhibition, other artists, in my case, mostly conceptual artists and identity artists, were having big shows in the spacious white painted galleries of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis…  well, those “successful” artists from those years are now mostly forgotten and now about as well known as me…. which is to say they are complete failures… and have disappeared from the public eye as if they had never existed… 

but wait…  maybe is success in the arts, some ineffable quality unrelated to celebrity or notoriety or even survival in the public eye?  is it a something that does not need the validation of an editor, gallery manager or indeed any audience at all…  is the true genius like my great uncle who made up symphonies on his guitar while sitting alone in his room, and never performed them in public??  are we all geniuses waiting to be discovered, whether we are discovered or not??    

well, if so, it seems obvious to me that in that case, artistic success is of about the same value as closet masturbation when considered vis a vis the society at large…  this is the nihilist view, I guess and if I really believed this, I would encourage those who attend my passing to celebrate with a large bonfire of all my works…  okay, and I do sometimes think that is what my art will come to and I guess I am okay with that…  I have lived to a ripe old age, have had the rich experience of making lots of poems and paintings that have found a small audience…  so what if I am not a celebrity and so what if my work does not outlast me….  the apex of fame and success in my lifetime career as an artist is the interview of me that was done by the Wilzig Erotic Art Museum a year or so ago which is still posted and which you can see at:  https://www.facebook.com/WilzigEroticArtMuseum/videos/443428413395766/ 

the Richmond article mentions that he was an acquaintance of Jim Morrison, the famous rock star…  more than one person I have personal knowledge of, in the poetry world, delusionally  thinks that he/she should have rock star fame and fortune…  maybe Richmond wanted that kind of fame for himself…  apparently, he tried to earn money from his art, even though he was wealthy and managed to piss away a pretty substantial inheritance… but, in all honesty, almost nobody in the poetry and art world makes any money at all from their efforts much less achieving fame and fortune…  yes, music/poetry artists do achieve fame and fortune if they are talented and lucky enough to become stars…  but, even in that case, despite their wealth and fame, I have lived long enough to see the big stars of my parent’s generation all but disappear…  who listens to Frank Sinatra today??   I was talking to a young person recently and when I mentioned “The Beatles,” she said, “who”…  a very small number of poets from the last fifty years are still studied in creative writing and/or literature programs at colleges and universities, but how many of them are actually bought and read by ordinary readers???  remember that even Bukowski only started making money when he started writing novels and as novelists go, he was certainly never a best seller or a household name…


so, like Richmond and thousands and thousands of our peers, I am an artistic failure…  I never had an actual paying book contract, never had an art show in a big museum, never was paid for a reading…  my work and myself will be forgotten when I am gone except by my loved ones and when they are gone the work will probably all be long since consigned to a dumpster…  I would like to be more successful, but have to admit that the quality of the art and writing probably warrants about the degree of success that I have and at this age (75) I am on the downhill slide and whatever success I would have in this life, I have already had…  (I have read enough artist biographies and autobiographies to know that artists usually overvalue themselves and their art as well as their talent or ability to create “great” art and I refuse to partake in that fallacy!!) 

perhaps the only consolation I have, if any, is that even the most successful of artists and poets are virtually unknown outside of the literary world in one case or the art world in the other… and that we will all, Bukowski, Morrison, Lennon, or Ginsberg…  Huffstickler, Richmond, Jones or Olson …  etc. etc. etc.  be as forgotten as yesterdays bad news, in the case of the famous, in a generation and in the case of the rest of us, the day that we drop over dead.