A poet looks at ambition

I was thinking again of David Budbill, who explored the question of ambition.

Is it better to be a known poet or a wild poet-monk on the mountain?

                        What if I wrote my poems

            only on walls or scraps of paper

            and gave them away to strangers?

Don’t all writers want success — fame, a big publishing contract?

Budbill’s answer was that to seek fame is to put other people at the center of your life. Fame is just the reaction of other people. Do you need that?

The lines are from “Wild Monk Or?”