Down deep, in the darkest part of the heart, no matter how modest we have become or profess to be, doesn't every writer—woken in the middle of the night for an immediate Yes or No—wish for Fame? The most selfless, the most resigned to Fate, the most given to ars gratia artis , would gladly accept some recognition. Or so I believe after more than twenty-five years' labor in the proverbial fields. What happens when the spotlight glances off the lapels of the glamorous and God-blessed, picks us out one time standing in the back, hoisting our metaphorical spears? Don't we gasp, straighten our ties, check our hair, and let ourselves believe a bit of that stardust might fall on our foreheads, and, against all better judgment and experience, change our lives? Answer the phone one time expectantly, open the letter mentally rolling the bones as if everyone were due a lucky break, and you're done for. It's almost genetic, systemic, buried in the blood, tugging us away from logic, realistic appraisal, and the plain hard facts of the work being its own reward. Fame, a crumb or the whole loaf, is something we desire even when we say we don't, even when we know it doesn't really mean a thing—spiritually, metaphysically, aesthetically. Just once, we'd like to lay our cards down in the light and clear the table. Most poets I know go to the mailbox the way gamblers go to the casino, the way the hopeless or bereft go to church. Even if they say they don't. They do. Why else send it out? Why not put it all in a drawer with your freezer-burned heart, thereby eliminating all prospects the way that Emily Dickinson did? Given one extreme or the other, most would choose Walt Whitman's route—self-publish and proclaim yourself wondrous before the burning and indifferent universe, the irresolute press.
No one likes loser-clubbers, whiners who begrudge the good their due. We can't all be stars, logic would dictate. Some writers are tiresome, a host are passable, and even sometimes the truly exceptional are rewarded. Yet marketing and celebrity in America account for most everything—in Hollywood, on Wall Street, or on Main Street. We hate to hear it but who you know and/or do lunch with counts for a good deal. Imagine that. The same obtains in politics, selling T-shirts, or selling off the national wilderness to selected oil and mining concerns. My favorite line from Louis Malle's marvelous film, "Atlantic City" is— "We don't do business with people we don't do business with." From the department of redundancy department, but true. Beyond that, there's just no telling why some are tapped on the shoulder by the angel of Fame and given the whole glittering nine yards—no matter the substance of the writing, or the lack thereof—and others are not. As a beginning writer, you're up against it.
Perhaps the best way to get beyond it is to never really "go there" at all? Write, publish when you can, but be Zen; get on with the work, cut the complaining, and do the little thing you can. Still, some bit of confirmation along the way wouldn't hurt—a letter, a review, a small check or invitation. The extraordinary and original poet Larry Levis wrote, "Anything is enough if you know how poor you are." Larry won some prizes and received a couple grants, but he did not "network," did not schmooze or flatter to do so, and who, relative to his genius, is more overlooked than Larry? But what Larry said about modesty, the essential and ultimate poverty of our vocation obtains, especially in those moments when we are realistic and humble, given wholly to the work—in short so beat down with circumstance that we become whatever's next to "spiritual"
Yet as a graduate student writing my first poor earnest poems, wearing my dead step-father's moth-bitten cashmere sport coat to look as bona fide as possible, I wanted to be acknowledged—if only in the small arena of graduate school writers at San Diego State, if only in a small magazine typed on an IBM Selectric typewriter late at night in the office of a furniture rental store where one of our "editorial board" worked. If we Xeroxed and stapled 150 copies and couldn't give them all away, it was nonetheless important to place a poem in there, to have an official "stamp" on my work, even on that pitiable scale.
Fame and fortune elude us early on—choosing-up for teams on the playground, class elections in grammar school, sports championships, scholarships and college prizes—all which we're sure will improve our lives immediately and into the future. Observation tells us that it's all out there to be had for those with maniacal drive and unflagging self worth. And the average writer who gets by allowing the work to be the thing nevertheless yearns for some approval because he/she believes in the hard work done—that kind of peripheral ambition generally kept in check so we don't sell out. So even a little regard can get into your blood like a drug and have you making endless comparisons with the haves, have-nots, and shouldn't haves instead of getting a good night's sleep. Doesn't your spirit sink as you go through all those back pages of awards and grants in Poets & Writers every other month? At some point you'd think we would learn from insider trading, or from the flip side of the coin, randomness and the explosion of contests, and just go back to our desks and dig up anything we can learn about our lives. Finishing my first trek through graduate school, an M.A. in English at San Diego State, I had no idea how many lessons I still had to learn.
I had sent some early poems to a contest I read about on a flyer on the department bulletin board—something like The College Annual of Poetry , and one was accepted. In a moment of pride, I mentioned this to my teacher, Glover Davis, who was always candid. He picked out one of the metaphors in the short poem and asked, "You really think that's a good image" and then smiled a bit sadly. That was it. My first five seconds of fame, gone in a flash. Moreover he advised me that those college anthology things were usually a racket. True enough, shortly after the highly congratulatory acceptance letter came another asking how many copies, leather bound, of the anthology with my poem in it I would like to order at $39.95, which was not small change to a graduate student in 1973. Those companies, they took at least one poem from every sad soul who sent in. I never ordered a book or saw one, hoping that since I did not come through with the cash, they would drop my miserable poem from the book.
So much for early Fame, but Fortune was fast on its heels. Three or four months before I was set to graduate, Glover stopped me in the halls one day to ask if I had heard from anyone regarding a scholarship? I said no. I was planning on enrolling in a MFA program in poetry after San Diego State and had no money saved, so a scholarship would be a lifesaver. Glover offered no more details, just a hint of a smirk, and a couple months went by. Then one evening at my step-sister's house—where I baby-sat her three kids while she went to night school and where I received my share of poetic support via free dinners—the phone rang and it was the President of The Chaparral Poets of the Golden West. I had, she reported, been recommended by Prof. Glover Davis to receive their first ever college scholarship and would I be able to attend their convention in three weeks time at a hotel in San Diego. Dollar signs! I couldn't believe it, but I did, and I didn't pay any mind to the oh-so-poetical name of this group. I felt as if I'd just got a hold of that bad cord on the old toaster, and the air around me was humming with scholarship, scholarship, scholarship! Man, was I polite, jotting down times and dates and places and names, thanking the President and what must have been the large panel of judges who selected me from among thousands for this prestigious award!
At the time, it didn't even occur to me that I had never sent in a group of poems to this organization. In the weeks to come I became only marginally dubious as she called asking if I might leave early on Saturday to pick up several lady members on my way into town, and would I perhaps be able to come down the night before the ceremonies as well and give a workshop for their members, and a few other requests that I have now forgotten. I made excuses about people visiting from out of town to get me out of the bus service and the workshop. Still, I was thinking scholarship all the way—$500, $1,000, even $2,000 dollars—after all the word was scholarship as in supporting one while in school for a year, or more. Scholarship , I would endure the afternoon, and probably there would at least be a free lunch and maybe I could duck out early if they began with the college part. Wrong. There is no free lunch. You knew that. I knew very little. It had to be worth while—an organization with members, a hotel convention, scholarships!
Alas, as the old poets said, the scales soon fell from my eyes. I put half a tank in the old Chevy my step-sister had given me, the one with the bad cylinder that gobbled oil and gas, and drove a half hour to downtown San Diego, found the hotel and paid five dollars to park. Upstairs on the mezzanine, The Chaparral Poets of the Golden West were meeting, the signs in the lobby told me, and up I went to my reward. I was met outside the ballroom by the President and several other white, silver, and blue haired ladies and one younger gentleman in his fifties who proudly informed me that he had attended the Iowa Writers Workshop, though he had not managed to graduate. Strategically situated outside the doors were card tables upon which The Chaparral Poets were selling their books, all vanity publications as I quickly came to see. I was directed to one table where the most prominent member displayed crisp, blue hard back copies of her book of poems about John-John, Carolyn and Jackie Kennedy after the assassination—a subject she had managed to attenuate through to 1973 and her immediate circle of fame. I was polite—Yes, Of Course, and Thank You, and How Very Nice.... I did so want to get paid.
The room was packed with children from the local area schools, all who had written poems, and their teachers who had encouraged them to write the poems and who now would see them acknowledged for their poems. There was a large man with a large voice as the MC, someone I vaguely recollected from my youth pitching products in his baggy suit on local TV channels in L.A. Prior to the ceremonies and the envelopes being distributed to the lucky winners, he announced that we would be regaled with a presentation by the junior high modern dance class from La Jolla school. The curtains parted and fifteen young girls in black leotards fitting too tightly, or alternately too loosely, teetered on one foot waiting for the needle to drop on the Cat Stevens album and for "On The Road To Find Out" to blare abruptly through the speaker system. The dance ended with the young ladies teetering in their positions until someone lifted the needle, with a pronounced scratch, followed by the curtains closing. This was just a hint of what was coming.
Following great applause, the MC said he would now begin to announce the prizes, and my slip of a hope was that they would start with the college award and work down. They began with fourth grade, reading the names of four runners-up, the titles of their poems, and the name of their school and teacher. They then read the same information for the winners, and the third, second, and first place winners read the complete text of their poems. More applause, envelopes handed out, children bowing into the lights, then on through to the eighth grade, and a break before the high school awards. Sitting near the back, I stole a look around; the large doors to the room remained closed. There was no help. I knew no one and there was no one my age there—just The Golden Chaparral Poets and the school kids. Well, I thought, that at least meant they were giving only one college level scholarship, so enduring three hours of bad poetry and dancing might payoff. Out the few high windows there were no clouds, no seagulls—everything out there knew to stay away.
The last event was of course the first ever scholarship award at the college level and I was called up for an envelope presented by the President. I smiled, mouthed a thank you over substantial applause, and immediately different groups of The Chaparral Poets came up and put their arms around me posing for snap shots taken by their friends. One group switched off with the next as I tried to peak into the envelope to see how much the check was for. Someone called to the President and she walked away just long enough for me to fold back the flap and see what I had come to fear and expect: a check for $25.
I quickly tucked it back in the pocket of my dead step-father's sport coat and began walking down the long center aisle only to be caught up by the President and the fellow who flunked out of Iowa, inviting me to a member's hotel room to read a few poems and comment on the poems of those assembled there. No one knew I had checked the check, that I knew what a fatuous exercise in self-congratulation this all had been. They felt they hadn't been found out and so could continue to prevail upon my good nature, sustained by my gratitude and greed. I lied, saying I still had those guests from Seattle expecting me for dinner (there had been no lunch or food of any kind offered during the over three hours of the ceremony) and kept on walking out the door, waving politely a Thank You, Thank You, and a Good Afternoon Ladies, I didn't mean at all. Five dollars gas, five dollars parking, five hours of a Saturday shot to hell and the check for $25, which, after expenses, came out to $3 an hour for my suffering, for my aspiration to fame and fortune, emphasis on Fortune. Like any grad student, I was on a tight budget but would have paid $25 to be able to stay home. Driving back, I did not think about whether I really deserved a scholarship or not, or that I was just expecting to be lucky, to be rewarded for showing up. I thought about what Glover used to say about bad experiences, like "getting his bell rung" during a college football game— "at least I got a poem out of it"—but this was not the stuff of poetry on either end.
The stuff of poetry did, over the years, keep me afloat and I managed to publish with little magazines and small presses, for which I was truly grateful. Nevertheless, I kept trying the contests; I sent in the fees, ate hot dogs and drank jug wine. I had a first ms. of poetry by the time I finished up an MFA degree in 1976 and sent it into the Yale contest, one snowflake in a flurry, as I have said elsewhere. My somewhat realistic hope was that my ms. would come close enough to draw attention, and perhaps Stanley Kunitz would recommend it elsewhere, which is exactly what happened, so help me. Confessionalism was the rage and much of my ms. was in that mode. Kunitz wrote me a postcard I've kept until this day saying I didn't win, but my ms. was one of the final few among over a thousand and that my poems had "strength, structure, and dignity." Bless him. That one comment, largely undeserved it now seems, kept my psyche above water for years. He recommended my ms. and one other to the University of Texas Press and mine lost out by half a vote. Disappointing of course, but all writers need good friends who, as my friend Jon Veinberg's aunt always said, "Eat marinated meat and tell the truth!" Jon soon had me seeing that I was fortunate to have had my ms. not taken. I tossed most of it and started again. At the time, I never realized the infamous "Fame" I would have had if that early ms. had in fact been published. I didn't know my luck, such as it was.
With the ms. of my third book entered in the National Poetry Series I again came close, or so I heard from a well connected friend. One of the five celebrated poets selecting books that year had narrowed things down, I was told, to my book and one other. The famous poet could not decide between the two and, the story went, finally tossed a coin. My intuition always was that my friend tried to spare my feelings, as the book selected seemed to be more the style of the famous poet. Ah, but what if the coin had come up in my favor? was the question I had to keep from asking.
We all have our karmas. Mine seemed to be running just out of the money. Nevertheless, I was nothing if not tenacious, read "stubborn." I kept sending poems out to places where I most wanted to have my work and finally placed two poems in POETRY when John Frederick Nims was editing. It took several tries, but I got in. Following that, he rejected everything, and after about ten more submissions he brought all of his faculties to bear and wrote saying, "Maybe you're just not writing as well as you used to."
Knowing I was pretty disheartened by this, my friend Gary Soto one day asked me confidentially if I wanted to know the secret of getting poems taken at POETRY, where he often published. I said Sure, for an instant thinking there might be a handshake, a password. Soto then said, "Send good poems!" He was a pal and we were used to a bit of razzing. But even there, I was ready to take a shortcut to even this modest level of fame.
But soon, Daniel Halpern at Antaeus was accepting poems and I'd never once been to New York or to one of his fabled dinners. He knew me from no one and accepted several poems; what more could you ask? And then Howard Moss at The New Yorker accepted a poem, bless his soul. I cashed the largest check I had ever received for poetry, $189, and I thought finally I was headed somewhere. I wasn't. And that is where Fame and Fortune really began to rub my face in it.
Soto had published several poems in The New Yorker and he told me to expect letters—"People see your poem and write you letters; the magazine forwards them to you." He had received a number of letters in response to each of his poems, something that rarely happened with literary and small magazines. Sure enough, I received two letters and that seemed about right—my fame, or lack thereof, relative to Soto's. One was from a divinity student at Yale that I could not make heads or tails of, and the other, from a divorced mother in Detroit, was entirely surreal. It was 1981, I was teaching at the University of California Santa Barbara and the letter arrived in my department mailbox. The Program of Intensive English there was devoted to EOP students and there were about seven of us working in it, and we were a friendly and tight group. I opened this letter and began reading things that were hilarious due to their nonsequiturs, and so I took it into our little office and read it to my friends and had everyone breaking up. I should have saved that letter because it was so unbelievable, but in my early 30s, I wasn't thinking twenty some years into the future. The letter began with an indifferent reference to the poem and then went into what I'd had to say about relative language values and how I would be happy to hear that in her job for the telephone company she'd just told a rude customer to "f___-off," and felt great about it; moreover, she had used the same effective phrasing in responding to her belligerent teenage daughter with similar success. She was also glad I had had the lizard removed from my hand. It went on with a series of reports not only unconnected to my life, but unconnected to each other, so far as I or any of my colleagues could tell. There was more, and equally bizarre, but the specifics are gone with the grey cells of my 30s. It was a good laugh, but we were all finally puzzled. The letter was addressed to me c/o The New Yorker , so it wasn't a mix up in the mailroom. I was lost?
Later that year a colleague, who I hardly knew, greeted me outside the English department office with congratulations for my poem in The San Francisco Review of Books . I had no poem there and told him so. He replied, "Oh good, I didn't like it much anyway." The piece, as I came to discover, was a rather flippant lampoon of Ginsberg's "Howl" targeting yuppies and entitled "Yowl." It was written by Christopher Buckley and a co-writer, and so far as I know, is his only publication in poetry. But oh, the intimidation that travels with even a little fame. The chance that you might be slightly in the spotlight has people praising your work when they don't like it. When it is not even your work!
Not long after that encounter, my friend, the Fresno poet Ernesto Trejo, sent me a clipping from a recent Esquire with a photo and article about the marriage of Christopher Buckley. The reception looked pretty swank and there was a lot made about Christopher Buckley impulsively, and with exuberance, eating the orchid from atop his wedding cake. The writer of the article commented upon it and then Christopher Buckley himself was quoted talking about his motivations and reactions and general health subsequent to this amazing feat. This CB was blond, tall and thin, and sometime later, in another article, I began to make sense of things. He was also a writer, writing for Esquire then, son of arch conservative William F. Buckley, and he too had gone to Yale. (My father was William H. Buckley and he had once talked with William F., but considered him too middle of the political road, my father being just right of Darth Vader.) Anyway, in a mad moment of youth it seems he had a lizard tattooed on the webbing of his thumb, but as he was coming more and more into the public eye, had decided to have it removed. He had written a nonfiction book about travel on a tramp steamer and had done some book tours and readings, where, it seems, he met a divorced woman in Detroit and had a conversation, which she took up in her letter where it had left off after seeing "his" poem in The New Yorker . Mystery solved, but further confusion lay ahead.
In the late 1980s I moved to Pennsylvania to take a job at a state college about an hour outside of Philadelphia, and my location in the east seemed to escalate my identity crisis, the shoulder bumping with fame that leaves you on the side of the road. The double, the Doppleganger, a long-standing theme in literature, the stuff of movies or surreal or expressionist novels, was going to do nothing for my career. Right off, the librarian at the university, having received the copies of my books I sent, told me that my books were mixed in with other books, all under the same name. I began receiving calls and letters in my office. The first was a request from an editor at Scribners to blurb a book on the under-culture of body building in New York City. I did not pump iron—they wanted the other guy. I did not respond. I received a second letter saying the deadline was coming up soon. Then a phone call where years of explaining that I was not "Christopher Buckley" would begin. The editor thought I was the CB she wanted and that I was just trying to get out of doing the blurb. Her persistence suggested to me that the prose writing CB must hold some sway in NYC and/or among body builders. While attending a writers conference in Slovenia, I met the editor of a small press in New York, White Pine Press. It turned out he was publishing a novel by a friend of mine, Dixie Salazar, LIMBO. He asked if I would write a blurb for the back cover and I said sure, I'd be happy to as I was familiar with the book, but I told him I had the names and addresses of a number of women and men much more celebrated and qualified to blurb the book than I. He assured me he really wanted me to do it. He was a hale-fellow-well-met type and so I sent him a blurb. It occurred to me only after I'd offered the blurb that on the back of Dixie's book it would say these wonderful things followed by "Christopher Buckley." A little publishing deception, and sometime later Dixie reported people asking her how in the world she got someone like Christopher Buckley to blurb her first novel. It was then up to her to explain I wasn't who I was, or however she would phrase it.
Not much time went by and I received a call from someone at NYU for an anthology of short stories he was editing. The book would feature Tom Wolfe, Hemmingway, T. Coraghessan Boyle and other luminaries. Sorry, wrong guy. Ok, do I know where he is? No, try Esquire for whom he writes occasionally. Another editor of a small poetry magazine who had a new job at the Museum of Art in Philadelphia called to ask me to read at the museum for their "First Wednesday" festivities and to help promote his new issue. He knew who I was, and to prove it he offered no payment beyond a free dinner at the museum. That was the best offer I'd had in a while and I took it. Near the entrance there was a good jazz quartet and tables set up for light dinners and wine; there would be a classic art film shown at 8:00. Up the steps to the second floor and far to the back in the dark cloisters was the poetry venue. I was asked to do three twenty-minute readings with twenty minutes between each reading to accommodate the crowds drifting in. Eight or nine people poured into each reading and after the last one a man came up to me holding a magazine. He was pointing to a fellow in a photo and, looking me right in the eye, said, "You're not Christopher Buckley—he comes in for gas to my dock in Connecticut every summer on his yacht." "Oh, so that's what happened to my yacht!" I wish I'd said, but holding a book with my name on it was my only response.
It went on. A note from Charles Simic—a wonderful poet—saluting me on my essay in The New Yorker . I'd exchanged a few letters with Simic re my Fulbright visit to Yugoslavia and the poets there. He was very kind and had sent me a copy of his translation of Aleksandar Ristovic's Some Other Wine And Light . It just felt like very bad manners to write him back and say it was the other CB now writing little essays for The New Yorker , and TV Guide . I'd also been publishing the occasional poem in The Sewanee Review and once had a phone conversation with the editor, George Core, who said, without compunction, that he really didn't like the piece I wrote on Vietnam in Esquire , and that time I was happy to explain I wasn't Christopher Buckley. Not long after that I received a call in my office from an editor at Esquire , asking for my address. Once I straightened him out on who I wasn't, I pointed out that since the other CB wrote for them, he should be able to check the files there. My friend and former teacher, Diane Wakoski, suggested I use my middle initial to halt the confusion, but I'd been publishing since 1974 without the middle initial and didn't feel I should have to change things now.
The most memorable mix-up occurred months before the Clinton/Bush election. The phone rang at home one Friday morning and it was the woman who coordinated guests for "The Today Show." Very deferential—Can you talk now? Have I caught you at a bad time?—she didn't say exactly why she wanted me on the show, but she was pushing me to commit to coming on. I explained that I was a poet; she said she knew that and had obtained my home phone number from Vanderbilt University Press who published two of my books. Yes, I replied, those are my books, but you are looking for the other guy. No, she emphatically reinforced that she wanted me to be on the show next week. By this point in time, I had come to learn that the other CB had been a speech-writer for George Bush, and moreover my politics were 180 degrees different from his. Without too much thought, I could see that she wanted me/him to offer insider evaluations of the candidate. This woman was used to people dodging requests to appear, and she kept after me until I offered an evaluation of Bush and the Republicans—something about Iran-gate, lying, the selling of America as opposed to honoring the social contract of government—that finally left no doubt in her mind that she had the wrong man, and she hung up before I finished.
In 1996 I received a very nice invitation to read at the 30th Annual Sophomore Literary Festival at the University of Notre Dame. The letter came to my department office in Pennsylvania; a young woman with the very horse-and-hounds name of Hunter Campaigne was the chair of the event and seemed to know who and where I was. I was asked to give one reading and a workshop, accommodations were covered, but "an honorarium is negotiable" the letter said. I figured the cost of a rent-a-car, driving time as I hate to fly, and wrote back accepting, but saying that I would need at least $500 in honorarium. I looked at the list of past participants and could see I would be among the great and the glamorous—they had had Diane Wakoski, Tim O'Brien, Gwendolyn Brooks, Tobias Wolff, Sharon Olds, Galway Kinell, Derek Walcott, T. Coraghessan Boyle, but also a few folks closer to my level further down the ladder, and one or two I had never heard of. It was me they wanted, I told myself. But if I'd read back further on the list, to the late 1960s, I'd have seen William F. Buckley, Jr., George Plimpton and the like and the buzzer should have gone off. But I didn't, it didn't. I had another letter from Hunter Campaigne requesting a CV and a current photo before she could finalize my appearance at the festival. I was currently out of photos but sent the CV and never heard from her again. The deal killer was asking for the $500—not too much, too little. When they received such a meager request, they knew I was not the Christopher Buckley they wanted. They wanted the writer of the light novel, The White House Mess , and Steaming to Bamboola . The famous don't show for $500.
In 2001, I received a second National Endowment for the Arts grant in poetry. Speaking with the coordinator after she gave me the good news, she told me who the judges were, and my response was, "Someone made a mistake." I couldn't believe that the poets on that list would choose my work, poetry politics being what they are. But there were more judges than in the past and so not every judge read your work. Some angel had guided my mss. past the hands of those with "agendas" and into hands of more receptive, or I like to think, objective, judges, into the hands of fortune for a change. The woman at the NEA knew I wasn't the other CB, and related the story of the final meeting during which the coordinator matches names with the winning numbers of the mss., for the proceedings are these days truly anonymous, unless of course you are a judge who recognizes your students' or friends' poems and does not recuse yourself. In any event, when she matched a number to "Christopher Buckley" there was, she said, an audible groan, the judges thinking that they had given a poetry grant to the Christopher Buckley of TV Guide articles and such novels as Thank You for Smoking and Little Green Men . She explained that I was not that CB and they breathed a proverbial sigh of relief she said. For once, not being Christopher Buckley landed me in fortune's lap.
A year later and did the NEA change my life? No. The phone still doesn't ring and it's still them on the other end. Notoriety turns the wheels and loosens the coffers, and depending on your tax bracket, you give a quarter to a third of your grant back in taxes. But it sure keeps you going, is acknowledgement from your peers, and enables you to repair the car and write over the summer without extra work. In short, it enables you to keep on with your work and that is more important. Much gratitude, no complaints.
The capper occurred in December, 2001. In one week I received a number of e-mails from friends and letters from relatives congratulating me on finally reaching the ranks of the celebrated. A poet friend wrote, "I know the National Book Award would be great, and a MacArthur even better, but you can't go wrong being part of the Final JEOPARDY answer, as you were the other day." A former student I had not heard from in twenty years also e-mailed after watching the show. I had not seen it, but to have your name mentioned on TV certainly denotes a degree of Fame in our culture. It turns out that the final question for the contestants was more or less, "Famous American painter about whom Christopher Buckley wrote the book, Blossoms and Bones ." And the answer was "Who is Georgia O'Keeffe?" I knew that recent quiz shows threw in a question about poetry at the high levels to stump contestants they know Americans read little poetry. While having dinner at my mother's one evening, I'd seen an episode of "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire" and the question that stopped the contestant at the half million dollar level was, "Who is the current Poet Laureate of the United States." More to the point, I knew that the other CB had some caché with NBC, TV Guide , and a number of slick magazines, and that libraries and Internet sites listed our books all together. It was not difficult to figure that some devious researcher thought that the book was by the other guy, that he was famous enough to mention in a quiz show question. Sic gloria transit mundi .
Art is long and life is short, and I found a little satisfaction recently when searching for two of my out-of-print letter press books. I was at the library using the Internet for a great web site, ABEbooks.com, which lists hundreds of bookstores and book sellers in the US and Canada. This was one of my first times at the site and instead of typing in a particular title, I just typed in my name and something like 870 books came up. Major poets such as Philip Levine might have a thousand listings; Tim O'Brien might have twelve hundred. I plowed through all 870 and, way back in the 700s, I found one copy of each book I wanted. Perhaps thirty of the books listed for sale were mine. Twenty or so belonged to a British Christopher Buckley who wrote books of military strategy about WWII. Roughly 800 books then were novels by the other CB, and despite celebrity, it didn't seem that many people held on to them. I was happy to pay some high prices for my two rare, beautifully printed books, content with my relative Fortune and Fame, even though I wasn't Christopher Buckley.
BIO: Christopher Buckley's most recent poetry books are Sky , The Sheep Meadow Press, 2004, and And the Sea , The Sheep Meadow Press, 2006, his 14th book of poetry. "Fame & Fortune, or, I am not Christopher Buckley" is from Sleepwalk , Eastern Washington University Press, 2006. Recently he has edited the poetry anthology, Homage To Vallejo , Greenhouse Review Press, 2006. And, with Alexander Long, he has edited A Condition Of The Spirit: The Life And Work Of Larry Levis , published by Eastern Washington University Press, 2004. Over the last 25 years his poetry has appeared in such literary journals as American Poetry Review, Poetry, Field, The Georgia Review, The Iowa Review, TriQuarterly, The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, The New Yorker, The Nation, The Hudson Review, The Gettysburg Review, Quarterly West , and New Letters among others. He has received a Fulbright Award in Creative Writing to the former Yugoslavia, four Pushcart Prizes, two awards from the Poetry Society of America, and is the recipient of NEA grants in poetry for 2001 and 1984. He teaches in the creative writing Program at the University of California Riverside but will reside at home, writing and enjoying the fruits of his labors and his recent Guggenheim prize.
