[David Mason]

I don't think it's a good idea to generalize about how writers make a living. If too many writers have been teachers in recent decades, which may well be true, that's one thing. But to say that teaching or students inhibit creativity is like saying that medicine and patients inhibit creativity. It's just too imprecise, and I could spend a year listing all the ways in which it's inaccurate. Any sort of job has demands that interfere with the artist's freedom, and sometimes that's a good thing. When George Seferis complained to TS Eliot that he was working so hard he never had time to write, Eliot replied that he shouldn't panic. The unconscious was always at work, and when his real poems needed to be written (as opposed to mere exercises) they would force their way through. Though I envy full-time writers like Thomas Hardy, I'm aware that a number of my favorites had to hold down jobs that "interfered with their creativity." These include Frost, Auden (periodically),Eliot, Stevens, and more recently Wilbur, Hecht, Justice, and on and on....I keep remembering Flannery O'Conner's response to a question about whether the academy stifles writers. Well, she said, it doesn't stifle enough of them!
As for the statement that poetry should not go where it's not wanted--what balderdash! That leaves poetry in a pretty small ghetto, and it had damned well better break down those barriers or it will shrivel up and die of its own internal preciousness. Most people don't KNOW whether they want poetry or not. That's why we need good teachers to help them discover the art in a pleasureable way. We have to combat the prejudices of an ignorant world, my friend. We can't simply sit around holding each others hands and praising each other's creativity.



[This message has been edited by David Mason (edited January 10, 2002).]

[Tom]

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[This message has been edited by Tom (edited January 30, 2005).]

[David Mason]

Well, I've dug ditches, harvested peas, unloaded fishing boats, worked for a film company AND taught, and I'd say that you've got a mighty romantic idea of working. You've also got a strange notion of the delicacy of the imagination. By your reasoning, poets should also not write literary criticism, which would leave that field bereft of its best practitioners. I'd say that poetry and poetics are tough enough even to overcome the teaching profession. This idea that we're all so precious we can't stand thinking about our art is just nuts. Forgive my bluntness.

[This message has been edited by David Mason (edited January 11, 2002).]

[Tom]

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[This message has been edited by Tom (edited January 30, 2005).]

[David Mason]

I don't see how you can knock it if you haven't tried it. And as for poets who have written criticism, here's a short list:
Plato
Horace
Sidney
Pope n' Johnson
Wordsworth
Shelley
Coleridge
Keats (in letters)
Whitman
Dickinson (in letters)
Browning, Mr.
Arnold
Longfellow
Frost
Pound
Eliot
Stevens
Moore
Williams
Hart Crane
Robinson Jeffers
Olson
Creeley
Duncan
Snyder
Anne Waldman
Donald Hall
Don Justice
Tony Hecht
Dick Wilbur
Annie Finch
Dana Gioia
William Logan
Anne Stevenson (not fretting about chronology now)
Mary Kinzie
Emily Grosholz
John Haines
Ted Kooser

and on and on--hasn't done those folks a bit of harm....

Seriously, though, one can't be writing one's best poetry all the time. The muse has other minds to visit, I guess. In those down times we might as well keep something else going: light verse, translation, prose, etc. And some of that work even turns out to be useful.

[Richard Wakefield]

David:
I don't claim to hold myself up as an example of the successful pursuit of poetry AND criticism AND teaching, because I only rarely feel successful -- you know, right after a class that goes well, or at the moment a couplet snaps into place, or for a moment or two when I've written something that really explains how a poem did what it did. But it has been a productive confluence of careers. There's always something to turn to when, as you put it, the muse is visiting another mind. It always feels as if I'm working on the same essential material, merely in a different dimension. And having done many other things, as you have, I can confirm your claim that there are far worse ways for a writer to make a living. I sometimes miss farm work, but only on mild days and only for short periods. I never, never miss my days in a big corporation, or in retail, or as a laborer...
Richard