Why Not Knowing Shit About Shit Is About All The Shit We Get To Know Of Life

J. Michael Yates Taught Me That Before He Was Run Out Of Fayetteville By The Toe Jam Poetry Posse

Although born in Missouri, Mike Yates was a citizen of Earth, which made him less than the ideal visiting writer to the creative writing program at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville in the early 1970s.

Like all my good teachers, Mike introduced me to many writers of whom I was totally unaware, despite having spent much of my life as a student of composition and literature, but the main thing I remember about Mike was a lecture he gave in a course I can’t remember the name of where he talked about how to tell if your writing is worth a shit, which, for many people, is the same thing as trying to determine whether they themselves are worth a shit.

Not that it matters, because, as you are all well aware: matter is simply the least interesting form of energy. That’s what Einstein taught us.

Everyone shits from cradle to grave, and our attachment to shit colors everything we do while also making it redolent.

I’ve actually had interesting and delightful conversations with people who have spent most of their working lives studying shit. They are actually paid to study shit. The only thing better would be paid to study shit that you are paid to produce. That’s the ideal definition of Heaven, if you really think about.

When you start out writing, you don’t show it to anybody, because no kid wants to be that kid. Being that kid is not going to do you any good at school or at the park. Your parents aren’t going to like it. “What if he’s a fag like those Beatniks?” God forbid some teacher find out you are that kid and you’ll end up talking to the guidance counsellor.

Eventually your addiction becomes unmanageable. You have run out of places to hide your shit, so you might as well face this problem head on before you have to start making excuses, so you maybe show one of the friends you don’t really like and ask him (with the proper pronoun to avoid any agreement error) what he thinks about some of your shit and he says: “What do you want me to say, daddio?” (because where you grew up dudes and bros had not yet been invented) and you say: “I was just showing you my shit.”

“I know,” he says.

This goes on with you showing your shit to friends until somebody makes fun of it. “That’s some of the stupidest shit,” your former best friend tells you, so you find a new friend.

Because the fact is none of your friends or family can be trusted to define for you the quality of your shit. If they rave about it, they obviously are planning to fuck you over somehow when you least expect it. If they like it, they could just be being nice. If they don’t like it, you can just find other family or friends that do and just rearrange your alliances, like real people.

Sooner or later you share some of the shit you’re most proud of with a teacher or pastor or priest or scout leader, and at first you’re surprised to find the same dynamic persists as with your family and friends, although some of your teachers may encourage you to send your shit to magazines they read or have heard about. You may even be given the name and address of an editor who has allegedly been known to publish shit like yours.

By now, your circle of acquaintances has tightened, even as your shitty frame has filled out. This gives you even more time to read shit by other people, and you remember it was reading shit that got you interested in writing your own shit to begin with. The happiest times are the times when you are alone with piles of shit, making your own or appreciating the shit of others.

But your shit alone cannot sustain you. You must participate in your society or your shit will not save you from the bin of defective parts where some people you have personally known have ended up.

So you start sending your shit out to small magazines, fanzines, independent publishers of broadsides of shit. I don’t know how it works today because I stopped participating in the submissive shit culture in 1991, but before then you would type up several poems or a story and write a cover letter and submit your shit (with a self-addressed stamped envelope for its safe return) to someone who would send it back to you with a form rejection slip.

These slips were usually brief. “Thank you for sending us your shit. We regret to to say that we are unable to consider your shit for publication at this time. Good luck with your shit. The Editors.”

You could feel bad about this, of course, but consider what reality must be like for people whose lives revolve around publishing other people’s shit. Maybe The Editors already have enough maudlin shit this month, or too many Italians. Maybe they were busy and didn’t even look at your shit and handed it off to an unpaid intern who didn’t know what to make of your shit, but had several pads of rejection slips available.

Sometimes you get a note. “These are a bit too sardonic,” one might say. An Editor might scribble: “These remind me of some shit” by some other writer your shit is nothing like and suggest you read shit by yet other writers whose shit you’ve already figured out.

And then one day, some of your shit finally gets accepted for publication, and you want to feel good about it, but then you remember that the magazine that accepted your shit had actually rejected the same exact shit a couple of years earlier before the old Editor committed suicide.

By now you’ve been writing shit for decades and you still have no idea of whether any of it means doodly squat.

No one is going to be able to validate your shit. You are the only person on the planet capable of judging the value of your own shit.

But then the same gnawing doubt grows in your ulcerated digestive system as you realize how little of your time is spent fully conscious. Life has become a slog through other people’s shit just to earn enough to buy the solitude required to create your own shit. You’re just like Jackson Browne’s “The Pretender:”

"And when the morning light comes streaming in
We'll get up and do it again
Get it up again"

Waking, bathing, shaving, brushing one’s teeth, dressing, commuting, working, eating, sleeping, shitting, pissing, laughing, crying, much of it done mindlessly while thinking or dreaming about something else.

How can you ever be sure when you’re grading your shit that you’re really all there?

That’s when you can finally appreciate the full value of your shit.

That’s what Mike Yates taught a whole class full of writers in Fayetteville, Arkansas, about knowing your shit, before heading back to Canada and thanking his luck at having survived the toe jam school. I have never forgotten that lesson.

I can’t speak for the rest of the class.