Poet Luke Johnson says being a poet is a real job. Well, sorta:
There’s precious little recompense in the life of a poet. It almost doesn’t make sense to call it a “career’”—because careers are generally synonymous with opportunities for advancement, benefits, and a retirement package. There’s little chance a successful collection of poetry will land you on Oprah’s couch (despite the recent “poetry issue” of O Magazine). There’s a much greater chance that it will land you in the wine-aisle of the wholesale grocery store. Most poets live in permanent recession and must be okay with the intrinsic 401K. The greatest professional reward they will ever receive is the just-written poem. Wallace Stevens called it an “unalterable vibration.” I call it afterglow. The completion of a first draft is a strange and miraculous thing—and more often than not the poem will need hours more work before it’s abandoned (and/or published)—but, those moments after the last period hits the page and before you realize the poem’s flaws are as close to religious experience as I’ve ever come (as the son of two ministers, this seems significant). There’s a renewed attention and clarity, a stirring, a sense that the world has finally fallen into place. Meaning invades household items: the puppy-ravaged couch, the dirty dishes, the neglected azalea bushes; all of them seem to glow with significance. The right poem at the right time can reveal the world in its glorious imperfection, can make it all seem manageable and sane.
But, alas, glow doesn’t pay the rent. So, poets teach, or they go back to school so they can later teach, or they collect obscure job titles to one day use in a cheeky contributor note (I currently work as a Pet Service Specialist).
April 21st, 2011 | 8:21 pm
This reminds me of a story told by the American poet Billy Collins. He says he was at a party when a man asked him, “What do you do for a living?”
Mr. Collins said, “I’m a poet.”
To which the man replied, “Really? My son writes poems…”
The poet goes on: “I just sort of stared at him for a moment. I wanted to say, ‘Oh, you’re a banker? I saw my daughter playing with some pennies a couple of days ago!”
April 22nd, 2011 | 12:02 am
Well, that just seems kind of jerky, frankly. If I were Billy Collins, I’m not sure I’d go around telling that story to other people.
Though I am reminded of a strange exchange I had once with the father of a high-school friend of mine, when I was in graduate school doing a poetry M.F.A. (which I never finished, lest anyone mistake me for a professional) and thought quite a bit of myself.
The father asked me what I was doing with myself, and I said I was a poet.
He said, “Well, I’d never let any of my girls do that.”
Hm. Anyway, these days I’m a lot more apt to say I’m a homeschooling mother — then people just say things like, “You’re crazy!” (actually, mostly people don’t say that, but some guy at a party once did, and I’ve never forgotten it).
But sometimes I still write poems.
April 23rd, 2011 | 9:46 am
Of course, anything can be a career if someone is willing to pay you to do it. To ask “Is being a poet a real job” is to ask the wrong question. Ask instead “Why won’t anyone pay for poetry these days?”
Now in fact people do pay for poetry these days, but the poets in question are called ‘song writers.’ At this point I imagine that modern poets would stiffen their collective backs and say something like “Would you compare Dickens to Harlequin Romance novels!? You dare compare my work to … to … advertising jingles!?” They would tell me the difference between a song and a poem. There’s not much in my mind. Yet you can surely understand the grievance of the poet who labors hard and long over a particular couplet knowing full well that no audience will ever read it – the same audience that can recite “Hold the Pickle, Hold the Lettuce” without thought.
So why won’t people pay for poetry these days. A few thoughts:
1. Technology has made music (specifically songs) much more accessible. At one time, music could only be heard in live performance. Now it is instantly available. The ‘needs’ satisfied by poetry are much more easily and directly satisfied by songs.
2. It’s easier to create a song than a poem. The whole is often greater than the sum of its parts. Good music plus good lyrics can produce a great song. Poetry must carry everything with literary construction, and so great poetry is extraordinarily hard to produce. There simply aren’t that many great poets.
3. The landscape of modern poetry is littered with schlock. Bad poetry abounds as poets write for themselves and their inner muse. This attitude is deeply embedded in readers. I assume that any poetry written in the last 100 years or so isn’t worth the effort. The probability that I would ever purchase a book of modern poetry on impulse is metaphysical zero. Yet I do have a copy of Kipling.
4. There are limited venues for the distribution of good poetry. How is the reader to be introduced to it? How is the poet to be noticed above the noise of modern culture? Magazines like FT will from time to time scatter poems about their pages but I have yet to read one poem in such a magazine that made me want to read the poem twice. Frankly, I have no idea how to find good poetry these days. I’m certainly not going to read journals devoted to poetry for the reasons specified in [3] above. Perhaps the internet will help this problem.
This is a loss to culture. I regret that there is no contemporary equivalent to Kipling or Poe. Great poetry often goes deeper than music. Today it seems we must be content with continually dusting off the work of past generations. Tis a pity.
carl
April 25th, 2011 | 8:25 am
Well, since Mr. Johnson brings up Wallace Stevens, it’s worth noting that Stevens himself never even TRIED to made a living as a poet. He was a very successful, very prosperous insurance executive.
For that matter, William Carlos Williams never tried to make a living as a poet, either- he was an obstetrician.
My point is not to denigrate poetry, just to point out that it’s been a VERY long time since anyone who wasn’t independently wealthy and wasn’t being subsidized by a king wrote poetry full-time.
A poet has to “get a job” and settle for writing something that occasionally resonates with a small group of people.
April 25th, 2011 | 9:46 am
Those are excellent points, I think. (And I didn’t mean to sound so snarky and self-congratulatory in my first comment, either. I just thought it was snarky of Collins to be far more interested in himself than in the man’s son who wrote poems. What if the son were talented and invested in writing poems? Did Collins ask? Or was he too busy scoring mental points against the banker philistine?).
Anyway. It occurs to me that when poetry really did occupy the place which the popular song fills today, it’s because poetry was the popular song. And in the various eras of the wandering minstrel/bard, poetry consisted of a handful of story lines which everyone knew (the Trojan War narrative, Beowulf). Much medieval poetry was written to be sung or acted. It was a public medium, and didn’t demand, necessarily, that you as a listener care about the Blessed Virgin Mary, or whether sumer was ycomen in and the cuckoo was singing ludely. It presumed that you already did care. And it presumed that you liked to sing or hear singing.
I don’t know what’s to be done about that, if anything, in contemporary poetry. It does seem to me that our era is no more littered with schlock than any other era would have been, and there are contemporary poems and poets whom I love. I wonder whether I would love, or even know them if I hadn’t a) majored in English in college, which meant that I had the good fortune to take classes from one of those poets and to read his friends; and b) then gone to graduate school to study poetry, which meant that I not only took more classes from and read more contemporary poets, but had the good fortune to attend live poetry readings (not all wonderful, of course, but many of them were). Outside that network, would I have paid attention to poetry as a living tradition? Quite possibly not.
The Irish poet Eavan Boland once asked a writing group of Dublin women whether or not they would tell people that they were poets.
“Heavens, no,” one woman said. “People would think I didn’t keep my windows clean.”
April 25th, 2011 | 12:43 pm
Being a poet is more of an avocation than a vocation. Before the academization of poetry in the 1960′s and 1970′s most poets were literary gadflies who made an income by writing reviews for magazines and newspapers. Some like August Kleinzahler still do so today although the majority of his peers seem to have found a home in MFA programs.
IF the point of this blog posting is to suggest that writing poetry is not “real” work then I guess that could be applied to all art. None of it is “real” in the sense that it is indispensable to survive from one moment to the next. But “man does not live on bread alone” to quote Jesus and I would go so far as to say part of being human is expressing oneself using art, including poetry.
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