risking everything
“I would make a great magazine editor, too, but the people at Condé Nast don’t seem to know that.”
–Roger Housden in intro to Risking Everything: 110 Poems of Love and Revelation
Today I dipped into this collection, which I checked out from the library. I also went to the bookstore and browsed in the poetry section. What I took down was Cesare Pavese’s collected poetry. What I read over coffee was not the poems, but the introduction. I keep running into Einaudi–Natalia Ginzburg, Italo Calvino, Cesare Pavese, all associated with this publisher in Italy during the Fascist period. I’m fascinated by these people, the press, what they stood for, what they suffered for.
The contrast between Einaudi then and Condé Nast now bothers me.
What am I trying to say? I’m impressed by the idealism and the grander purpose Einaudi had. Fighting Fascism. Pavese was imprisoned, suspicious because he studied and translated American literature. Ginzburg lost her husband Leone, tortured and killed in prison.
Their place was Turin, a town I know nothing about. When I think about visiting Italy again, Turin does not pop into my head.
What am I trying to say? I’m trying to make a negative statement about commercialism and a feeble attempt to reach toward a broader responsibility.
I’m trying to say I feel critical of Roger Housden and his poems of “Risking Everything,” these poems that urge us to take “risks.”
“The risk they urge us toward is the forgetting of our familiar lamentations for a moment and the taking of that tiny yet momentous step–the willingness to try on the life that is truly ours.” (p. xv)
If I were to go a little further, I would say that focusing on our lives, or our lamentations, or even our loves and revelations is focusing on an illusion. A warm illusion, like a fresh-from-the-oven Krispy Kreme donut. It puts me in a place I cannot really respect. It puts pressure on me that I cannot solve.
Of course, this whole issue cannot be solved. History is tricky. You can’t insert yourself into another time, another place, where risks meant something else. Here, today, I sniff around Seven Stories and Soft Skull. I look at Ad Busters every once in awhile. I made a list: Mouth, NPQ, Salon.com. And there’s also Clamour.
I don’t really know what I’m doing. I don’t have the talent, the credentials, or the fire to be like Housden, let alone Ginzburg. There is absolutely no way I would really Risk Everything. I don’t even know what to write about. I’m paralyzed. I don’t know what I’m trying to say.
Then again, this is not up to me. So much for “my life.”