Richard Brautigan

A minor poet isn't a bad thing to be.

It's actually a pretty nice way to live, sitting still in the quiet of a public library, especially on a weekday when other people are working, and reading a book or looking among the shelves for lesser known or forgotten writers.

And maybe have the first line of a poem come to you out of nowhere.

(Writers, this is why you must keep a pen with you at all times, and a piece of paper.)

A minor poet thinks about the poem first and the publisher last, whereas a major poet is obsessed by thoughts of the poem and the publisher simultaneously.

Minor poets do lots of walking. You can see them around town, usually with a shoulder purse large enough for a couple of books, crossing the street or waiting on the corner for a bus. They speak when spoken to but very seldom initiate conversation.

There's probably one living in your neighborhood, maybe right next door, and you don't even know it. He's typing away right now, working very hard on another minor poem to add to his collection.

A man is much more likely to be a minor poet than a woman, though no such statistics are kept. It's just that men are more likely to think of themselves as major poets whether they are or not, such is the social and cultural conditioning that creates in them the need to be the biggest, the best etcetc. It's such a pity too that so many of them are so unhappy; since the world is only able to tolerate one major poet at a time, it stands to reason that there will be far, far more minor poets than major poets.

(Woman poets, whether they are major or minor, don't seem to suffer this way. They are just plain poets, major or minor, who write poems that are either good or bad.)

Once in awhile a minor poet becomes major, but it's usually the other way around, that a major poet becomes minor over time.

Here's how it happens: a minor poet enters the library and discovers the major poet's books lined up one-by-one on the shelf and pulls the books down, taking his time to read the poems, discovering the major poet to be minor after all, and putting the books back on the shelf.