Life Lessons From a Professional Poet

David Merritt Speaks to Me

When I was a young writer, and I was your age when I started writing, there was no such thing as a creative writing school.

Life is your creative writing school

Now we have 25 year old kids who have a masters in creative writing. They use cut out poems. They are in the Literacy Festival Circuit, they are going to literary residence In Germany. And by the time they are 30, they have done everything. And they still have got 40 years of their adult life stretched in front of them. Some people get too good too quick too soon. They have all the qualifications, certificates and technical know-how, but they have no real job, no real writers voice. Because their skills are not unique, they are cookie cutter writers.

You can only write Poetry as deep as you have experienced life

When I started I was awful, of course. Whenever anyone starts they can only write juvenile like, because those are the only experiences that you can draw on.

As you get older the experiences rack up. So the topics and subjects you can write about and the emotions you can touch on broaden.

You can’t write about the death of your parents until your parents die. You can’t
write about the death of the dog until the dog dies. You can’t write about the birth of a child, you can’t write about bad love, until all these things have happened to you.

Otherwise, you are just writing fiction, but poetry isn’t fiction. Poetry is a strange combination of poetic licensed bullshit and fact. People can not know that yet until you get older. When you’re young every word has to be perfect, but that’s bullshit as well.

And did you always want to write words?

Yeah, I always knew what I wanted to do. There are 30 poems on this table, there are 3 collections. Now you know, I can sit on the side of the road, with a bench, the bench becomes the table, this becomes my publishing empire. I figured that out 15 years ago and then my income went up by 95%. You see, in the conventional publishing industry, they publish a book of poems, and they print 300 copies. That’s it. It’s only sold in 9 to 13 bookshops around the country. The bookshop takes 45%, the publisher takes 45%, you, dear poet, get 9% of the price of the book, even though you’ve done most of the work.

Trade Secrets

So avoid that, instead become your own publisher. You can be a desktop publisher and it’s easy! You do it all the time anyway. You are writing
stuff on your computer all the time, just gotta know how to format it nicely. That’s what desktop publishing is — making it more attractive.

Taking it out of microsoft word and put it into another piece of software to make it a PDF. That’s all I do: make PDFs. And I write poems, and I make a pdf out of it. Then I print it off and and I stick it onto the covers of old reader’s digest and I sell it for 5 bucks. And when that one sold I make another one to replace it. And then I sell that for 5 bucks. It is simple really.

Creating your own Structure

So when I first started I had 10 books. And then I made a decision — Every year I will put out another 7 or 8 poems. But I’m still publishing those 10 first books from 15 years ago. Because you don’t wanna be out of print. If you print 100 books and then they are all gone, then what do you do? So you do not have to print thousands of the same copies. Such keep writing and make sure everything is always in print.

People will say somethign like: You’ve gotta print 500 copies. But that’s bullshit as well because with digital printing, one copy is as cheap to
make as a hundred copies. There’s no economy of scale in printing anymore. Your first job is to write, because that is what you are. A writer, not a sales person or a merchandiser.

You understand?

How the words find the People

I put myself where people are so people can find me. As simple as that. I go to markets, I go to festivals, I sit on the side of the road in a busy part of town. People see you, you are there every day. You go there every day, it’s your 8 hour day like everybody else, making your shift. It takes years sometimes for people to stop and ask: “what are you doing?“ They have
seen you, they’ve walked past for years. And then one day, suddenly they ask: “what do you do?”

Making a Living As A Writer

I’ve done a lot of jobs in my life, other than being a writer. Because you have to, you can’t just live off your writing alone initially. It takes a while.

Now I can live off my writing, but it took me 25 years to get to this point. And 15 years doing it this way to get to this point as well. So, you’re better off to be a comedian. I am not joking. I watched the best poets of my generation go off to become comedians because that’s where the money was. They got a TV show. And they go to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and
the Comedy Circuit going around the fucking world. But they weren’t New Zealand comedians, they were global comedians. No longer kiwi’s telling the kiwi story.

You know, as soon as you go overseas, you cess to be a Kiwi.
How can you be a New Zealand poet if you’ve spend the last 15 years in Berlin? Once you go overseas, the influence of this country disappear and then the whole world’s influences are upon you. As a creative person you are constantly being influenced by the environment you are immersed in. It is not wrong, it is just something to be aware off.

Being Shaped By the Culture You are In

If I leave New Zealand and keep writing poetry I am no longer writing the poetry that pours from New Zealand I am writing the poetry that pours from wherever I am. The culture and environment that you are in become the bricks and mortar for your creative expression, so you start creating with what is in your environment. And then you are no different from every other poet or writer of the world who’s out there. It is so important to live your life fully and deeply, with lots of different experiences because that becomes the well that you draw from as a writer. Then you refine your authentic voice and you are heard, clear, because you are free to say things in the way only you can say them. That way you are not trying to please anyone else and fit into a mould. People read poems to hear something real, something closer to their experience of living. Poets and writers have a commitmet to tell the truth, sometimes it is heard more clearly if it is wrapped in bullshit. Then people laugh, but still they are touched, something has reached them.

Thank you David, That is a noble job indeed.

Find more: https://www.artivist.co.nz/david