As much as I’d like to tell you that poets spend their entire time writing, not bothering with the real business of life, the truth is that poets work too. And they are involved in various professions – from medical to legal, from education to insurance.
Poetry is a vocation, a calling and not work, to many of us involved in this pursuit. But sometimes, a poet cannot get by on craft alone and might seek employment. Or he or she may work just for the pleasure of it and because it creates happiness. For instance, a woman poet I know is a writer of non-fiction books, apart from running a charity. Another poet is a distinguished retired officer from the Indian Air Force who creates jewellery for sale and for good causes. One of my oldest friends writes soulful poetry, leads a hectic life and travels the world as the Deputy Director of an arts foundation. Today we’re looking at poets and their day jobs.
As I read Katherine Larson’s ‘Love at Thirty-Two Degrees’, the lines yielded a most interesting comparison. “In a few months the maples will be bleeding. That was the thing: there was no blood/only textures of gills creased like satin, /suction cups as planets in rows …” I read up on the poet and learnt that this 2010 Yale Younger Poets prize is a molecular biologist. Such different worlds coming together, so beautifully. Two different worlds also come together in Pablo Neruda. Would you believe this frank, sensual poet was a diplomat? Perhaps all the diplomacy in his profession led to the sheer celebratory honesty one reads in his lines.
A ‘modern garden centre’ is the stimulating environment in which Jean Bleakney works. Read her playful and profound ‘Improvisation’ (it has close to 50 words ending with –ate) and you’ll see yet again how nature offers such wonderful encouragement. Staying with the theme, it’s no wonder that Robert Frost can create a dreamy woodsy scene, among other tableaux – he was connected to the land as an agriculturalist. Work could be rather mundane too, in some instances. T.S. Eliot worked in a bank, managing money and the ‘Morning at the Window’. Wallace Stevens was an executive at an insurance firm, proving that insurance and Ice Cream just might go together. William Carlos Williams not only wielded a pen, but also a stethoscope – he was a paediatrician. And Charles Bukowski whose love poetry is unusual, was a postal clerk.
In the course of my research, I discovered that Irish poet W.B. Yeats was into occult and magic. And I wasn’t in the least surprised that this man was a harpooner – Herman Melville, the writer of poetry and Moby Dick . Poets work and poetry does too.
The Blue Noteis Srividya's first solo collection of verse. Read more of her verse in her blogs, VodkaWaltz and Rumwrapt
