How Poets Earn a Living

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How Poets Earn a Living

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1SpinningJannie
Jun. 10, 2009, 9:24 pm

I'm doing research on how poets have supported themselves financially through the centuries and would welcome any tidbits people have about relatively well-known poets and how they got on, as well as how you, as a poet keep the wolf from the door.

2krolik
Jun. 10, 2009, 11:07 pm

A poet friend of mine used to say that he was a firm believer in corporate sponsorship of the arts...which was why he did as much of his own work as possible on company time.

3Magnocrat
Okt. 3, 2009, 9:42 am

Just like everyone else the poor struggled the well off sauntered along discontentedly.
Poets are not special any more than artists of any sort are special. They just have a way of expressing themselves which has universal appeal. If we are not careful we can put them up onto pedestals and start a process of worship.

4wungy
Okt. 3, 2009, 4:06 pm

when they publish their poems they get paid maybe?

5joannasephine
Bearbeitet: Okt. 3, 2009, 4:56 pm

Most poets have to have other jobs to pay the bills.

Payment for publication is pretty tiny – the average seems to be around $30 (which may be for one poem, or one publication involving multiple poems). Royalties from books are also quite small – 5% to 10% sounds good, until you realise that a lot of poetry books sell less than 500 copies. (Moral: poetry publishing is not a road to wealth.)

There's possibility in academia (although you usually need to be an established ‘name’ for that) and teaching poetry (or creative writing in general) can be quite rewarding emotionally – it's a great feeling when someone who comes in not liking poetry suddenly gets what it's all about.

You can pick up some money doing editing, judging competitions, reviewing … but almost never enough to live on.

(edited because half of my reply was cut off …)

6MarianV
Okt. 3, 2009, 8:05 pm

Most of the poets I know are teachers or professors, universities are considered better than high schools as the hours are more flexible. The most important thing is having time to write.

7rolandperkins
Okt. 3, 2009, 8:18 pm

Years ago*, Kenneth Rexroth wrote that only 3 contemporary poets in the U.S. made a living just on their poetry --and you might never guess who the 3rd was:

They were: Ogden Nash, Allen Ginsberg, and -- Rexroth himself!

If you define the metered dialogue of Elizab- ethan drama as poetry, I think that Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and perhaps other dramatists made a living, basically on their poetry. Milton probably didnʻt, but then the great bulk of his writing was prose. Samuel Johnson said "no man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money"-- but he tried poetry only occasionally and, many critics say, not very successfully.

*How long ago? -- Maybe in the 1970s.

8mejix
Bearbeitet: Okt. 3, 2009, 9:50 pm

didn't wallace stevens work in an insurance company and t.s. eliot had something to do with banking?
neruda and octavio paz worked for the diplomatic corps of their countries.
cortazar (some times a poet) worked as a grammar school teacher, and as translator at the united nations.
william carlos williams was a pediatrician (he was robert smithson's doctor, by the way)
shakespeare and garcia lorca were theater empresarios.
frank o'hara worked for the moma, i think.
cavafy was a public servant.
borges worked at a public library. at some point some politician demoted him to poultry inspector.

9rolandperkins
Bearbeitet: Okt. 4, 2009, 1:00 am

Hi mejx et al. :

Right, as far as I know, about "where they
worked"; Iʻm surest about Stevens, Eliot, Wiliiams, Shakespeare and Neruda. (Another diplomat was the Ecuadorian poet Jorge Carrera Andrade.)

Robert Lowell had a gig as a specialist in Poetry in the Library of Congress --before the present title of Poet Laureate was established. He also taught in the mid-50s at Boston University.

10PortiaLong
Okt. 4, 2009, 12:55 am

Sorry to butt in to your group but it's after midnight on a Saturday and I was cruising the "All Topics" ...

>5 joannasephine: your line "it's a great feeling when someone who comes in not liking poetry suddenly gets what it's all about." sparked a thought.

It's not that I hate poetry but I have never really got it and it has always slightly bothered me.

My spouse has a theory that part of the problem is that I read really fast - gulping down the gestalt of what is being said without paying attention to the word choices/details of the composition (I don't tend to appreciate prose that is, well, prose-y either - although the pedant in me slams to a halt if there is a grammatical error - go figure).

One of the few poets I have had much luck appreciating is Robert Service (whom I suspect poetry buffs would view as "low-brow") and even then I find I have to read aloud to add all the emphasis I feel is needed.

I'm well out of school so, unfortunately, I don't have the option of taking a class to educate my appreciation (or not easily at any rate). Any books that you guys would suggest to a non-poetry fan who would, nevertheless, like to "get it" in a limited newbie fashion?

11joannasephine
Okt. 4, 2009, 3:51 am

My favourites of this sort are Ruth Padel's 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem and/or The Poem and the Journey – they're quite UK-centric, but my experience with teaching is that UK poetry seems a little easier for newbies to slip into than American (wild generalisation, I know). On the US poetry side, grab a copy of Edward Hirsch's How to Read a Poem: And Fall in Love with Poetry and/or Poet's Choice.

But no matter which way you start, you are going to have to slow down your reading. Think of poetry as restaurant food, not McDonalds. But it sounds like you've got exactly the right instincts – reading out loud is a fantastic way of getting as much as possible from the poem. Poets use word meanings, just like prose writers, to tell you something. But they also use patterns of sound and structure to tell stories under the words – it's the sort of thing that happens almost without you noticing, but you will miss out if you speed across it as though running from the poetry police!

12PortiaLong
Okt. 4, 2009, 11:03 am

>11 joannasephine:

Thank you for your thoughtful reply to my midnight ramblings! I have added the works you suggested to my "investigate" list on BookMooch (no copies currently available, unfortunately - seems a number of people looking for them.) In the meantime, I'll try more reading aloud.

With Robert Service I know the tone and emphasis that makes the poem for me - both because I have heard the poems read aloud and I think I understand what he is trying to convey (Approximately 20 years ago, I was in Alaska/the Yukon and greatly enjoyed, as a kid, the period performance of "The Shooting of Dan McGrew".)

My mother had a favorite record at the library of Vachel Lindsay reading his own poems that she would check-out over and over again - so I know how those are supposed to go as well.

But, yes, I think slowing down is probably the necessary first step. Thinking about it now - I do occasionally have to do the "slow down/read aloud" trick for other types of writing as well - at least until I get the rhythms/pacing set in my head. Shakespeare and Dickens come to mind for this.

(Interesting side note - I've noticed that when reading Dickens I can't switch easily back and forth with other books, the language is too different - maybe reading a paragraph aloud when switching will "reset" something...hmmm, have to try that next time.)

13akelei
Apr. 29, 2010, 4:55 pm

The Dutch poet Rutger Kopland is or was a psychiatrist. Anna Enquist is also a psychoanalytic therapist and a musician.

14jburlinson
Apr. 29, 2010, 7:41 pm

So far, we've only mentioned western poets. In the east, large numbers of poets, especially from the classic periods in China & Japan, were civil servants (i.e. bureaucrats). E.g., Wang Wei, Du Mu, Cui Hao, Yuan Zhen, Ki no Tsurayuki, Ōshikōchi Mitsune, many others.

In English (including American English), a bunch of poets came from the ranks of clerics or priests -- John Donne, George Herbert, Edward Taylor, etc.

Then there's Doctor William Carlos Williams and librarian Phillip Larkin.

And of course there's spy (assassin?) Christopher Marlowe

15bookmonk8888
Jun. 26, 2010, 4:35 am

How Poets Earn a Living?

As poets, they don't - unless they're Nobel Prize winners. As pointed by several above, most have other jobs. If one wishes to devote a lot of time to writing poetry, then welcome to the ranks of "starving artists".

16carusmm
Mai 19, 2016, 11:58 am

Dieser Benutzer wurde wegen Spammens entfernt.

17madpoet
Mai 25, 2016, 12:16 am

>14 jburlinson: Most Chinese poets followed this career path: minor post in government-- resigned or was dismissed for standing on principle-- retired to the countryside, where he wrote poetry and drank-- suicide-- postmortem veneration.

18cl1914p
Mai 26, 2016, 10:11 am

15 Bookmonk8888: Yes, I think you've said it! Truth is, I write my poems just for readers to reader and soothe their souls!

19LheaJLove
Jun. 1, 2016, 9:39 am

Most Black poets in the United States have a professorship at a university. The most famous ones can make thousands of dollars per hour for public speaking engagements.

But without academia, I don't know what poets would do...

20thorold
Jun. 2, 2016, 11:04 am

A few more random ones that (I don't think) have been mentioned yet:

Dannie Abse was another medic (a radiologist, I think?)
John Betjeman was on the staff of the Architectural Review (and later a broadcaster and travel writer)
Robert Burns was a farmer (not very successfully) and an exciseman
Aimé Césaire was mayor of Fort-de-France
Chaucer was a courtier/diplomat/civil servant
Coleridge was (briefly) a soldier and occasionally worked as a Unitarian preacher
John Donne had almost all the traditional poet jobs - he was a diplomat, a pamphleteer, a politician, a jailbird, a lawyer and a (senior) clergyman at different stages of his life
T.S. Eliot was a publisher (but an academic and a banker before that)
Thomas Hardy was an architect (who also wrote a few novels...)
Gerald Manley Hopkins was another priest
A. E. Housman worked in the Patent Office (and later became a classics professor)
Kipling was a journalist
Roger McGough taught French for a while
Edwin Muir was a translator
Novalis was a salt-mine inspector
Stevie Smith was PA to a publisher
R.S. Thomas was yet another clergyman
Paul Verlaine was a civil servant in France and a schoolteacher in England
Walt Whitman was a printer (later also a journalist, unpaid nurse and civil servant)

21SplendorofDelight
Jun. 30, 2016, 12:20 am

A few more:

Edmund Spenser -- bureaucrat in Ireland (which was controlled by England)
Tomas Transtormer -- psychologist
William Wordsworth -- worked for the English tax agency
Michelangelo -- more famous as an artist (painting & sculpture)
Paul Muldoon -- radio & tv producer for the BBC before becoming a professor
Dana Gioia -- formerly in business (managed the Jello brand?), chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts (U.S.); currently a professor

Also, "Business and Poetry", an essay by Dana Gioia in his book Can Poetry Matter?, examines this subject. Highly recommended.

22tonikat
Feb. 12, 2017, 7:59 am

they/we "sell cheap what is most dear"...which has progressed to 'sell very cheap what is most dear', if you get to sell it at all. So to the day to day.

Quite a few write novels... quite a few who saw themselves as poets became novelists and are not known as poets, can't think of examples right now but an outcome that may have resulted from economic forces. then again it may also have been to do with their appraisal of their poetry (which may not have been right)...oh yes, Larkin write novels but stuck to the poems in his case, and Kingsley Amis was a poet.

I think Coleridge got an allowance from Wedgewood (which may not have helped creativity?) and I think Wordsworth was a little bit preoccupied to find some such income for himself, at least at one time, his finances developed over time.